24-09-2026, 04:06 PM
(24-09-2026, 03:29 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why valuating a correspondence of the most frequent vord-beginning characters? This would say that several quite frequent characters are appearing quite frequently and are somehow "neighbored" just by their numbers.
It is more complicated than just "there are lots of words that begin with Sh followed by words that begin with qo".
By my count, ~15% of the words in the VMS begin with qo. If each word was independently chosen without regards to the context, then, for any word X, about 15% of the occurrences of X would be followed by a qo-word.
But in fact 53% of all occurrences of Sheedy are followed by a qo-word, whereas for Cheo that number is less than 2%. And these discrepancies do not seem to be the result of sampling noise.
This sort of statistical "anomaly" is quite common in natural languages, simply because adjacent words are usually related by grammar and semantics.
By themselves, these statistics do not say much about the nature of Voynichese. But they may help when combined with other clues or hunches.
In English, for example, the Martians may notice that the words "this" and "that" tend do be followed by "is" more often than expected by chance, whereas "the", "thou", "thus", "they", "them", and "then" do not. That would be a hint that the first two words play similar role in the grammar or have similar meanings, distinct from those of the last six.
All the best, --stolfi