Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

Apologies for misunderstanding the nature of your ledger.  

But if the ledger has cycles, it accepts an infinite set of word types, no?  So you have a separate limit on the length of the words?  Or you generate text without spaces, and insert spaces by a separate method?

Does your ledger accept words with two gallows, or with an EVA [dlrs] between two benches {ch,sh}?

No apologies needed.  

The ledger itself doesn't have cycles and it cannot 'accept' an infinite set of word types but it could generate an infinitely long string. The ledger is not itself a generator so it doesn't even recognize spaces.  The scribe is the generator.  The scribe has to decide when a word is long enough and add a suffix.

The ledger provides the combinatorial rules needed to build words. It tells the scribe that if they have the letter A, here are the legal midfixes and suffixes that can follow that letter. It would tell the scribe that they could create the word daiin but they could not create dagrgy.   

The ledger itself is nothing more than a rule book for creating Voynich words.  It doesn't tell you how to create the line or the page.

Ok.  But I don't think there was ever a question of whether the hypothetical five scribes used different vocabularies.  The claim was that there were only two "languages", and Herbal was divided among them.  

It would make more sense to investigate vocabulary sharing among the sections, treating Herbal-A and Herbal-B as two sections.  It is expected that there will be differences in vocabulary due to different subject matters.

Actually, I think I can demonstrate that there were not 5 or even 2 different vocabularies. And I will debate whether there are two Currier languages. In my next post, I'll try to demonstrate that all 5 scribes and both languages are nothing more than scribal preferences using the same system.

It accepted 89.3% of [scribes 2-5] tokens and 77.6% of their types.

Those numbers seem rather low.  But low numbers are expected because of the small size of scribe-1 sample and the variety of topics.

Yea, that number is actually a bit misleading.  Scribe 2 used all of the ledger that scribe 1 had available and added 3 new midfix transitions: C→S, R→CH, and S→E.

The other difference between the two scribes is preferences.  If you remember my work on the bigram <ed> and how scribe 2 used it explosively, that's the big visible difference Currier identified.  Scribe 1 already had <ed> available to use but choose to not use it often.  Scribe 2 moved that transition from rare to extremely common. 

So scribe 2 did not invent a new grammar. It reused Scribe 1’s ledger, promoted some rare options into normal use, added a few new transitions, and changed which constructions were favored.

And... here's some more foreshadowing.  Scribe 1 may not have been the first scribe to start writing the Voynich, an assumption most all of us have. When I look at how the ledger changed and expanded for each scribe, the tentative scribal chronological order appears to be 5 → 4 → 3 → 1 → 2.  That being said, scribes 4 and 5 have relatively small samples so that's VERY tentative.