Harvard physicist's take on the VMS

[RadioFM]

Now I am not sure what you mean for "shorter text".  Do you mean that the words become shorter?  The number of words in the text obviously stays the same.

Yes, words become shorter. Now I suspect this might not be that big of deal in your case with East Asian languages, but for the default hypothesis of Lat./Ger./Rom./Greek languages, it can pose additional problems (though not insurmountable problems).

But my word model is ambiguous only when there are three or more e in a row: cheeedy could be {ch}{eee}{d}{y} or {che}{ee}{d}{y}.  But again, that is a problem for me -- the Author would know which is the right parsing.

I'm not critizing your (or anyone else's) word model, they're great pieces of work. What I'm saying is, the lack of a good fit for all folia can suggest there may not be a hard/mechanical procedure behind Voynichese, that was strictly followed to either encrypt, transliterate or produce gibberish. We see flexibility throughout, not at all inconsistent with "soft-"stochastic methods like self-citation, where scribes don't abhor degrees of freedom or occasionally bending some rules when writing down the next glyphs.

It depends on how you define the conditional character entropy.

If you use only the previosu character -- that is, you compute the entropy from the probabilities Pr(x[k+1]|k,x[k]), tthe sum of those entropies wil over-estimate the information contents of the text.  

If you use the whole prefix of the word -- that is, the probabilities Pr(x[k]|x[0..k-1]) then the sum of those entropies should be the entropy of the whole word.

Yes, but I meant the 1st order conditional entropy of a vord given the previous one: H(vord | previous_vord), not the entropy of the vord itself,  H(vord). What I said is, I'm not sure H(next_glyph | previous_glyph) necessarily correlates with H(vord | previous_vord), with the trivial exception being when parsing as "glyph" as the whole vord itself.

I computed that decades ago.  My recollection is that it was on that ballpark.  But I used the wrong knd of text.  I should recompute it from the Shennong Bencao.

Good to know  

Just one weird p that looks like a "-que" abbreviation in the whole VMS? and in the middle of a word?

And please make up your mind: did he borrow from scribal abbreviations, or from cipher symbols?

The Armenian alphabet has letters that look like S, U, L, t, n, q, j, etc.  But their sounds in Armenian are totally unrelated to their sounds in Latin or other European languages.  Ditto for Georgianand may other scripts. Even Ciryllic has "P" with sound "r", "C" with sound "s", "N" flipped with sound "i", "H" with sound "n", "m" with sound "t"...

There are only so may ways to make a symbol with 1-2 pen strokes.  Coincidences are more than likely, they are practically inevitable.

They could have borrowed from both, in fact I wouldn't be surprised to find out popular cipher symbols were borrowed from scribal abbreviation as a red-herring. I agree the simpler letterforms like d o a s l could be coincidences, perhaps even the main gallows, but we have (admittedly rare) instances like the ð I mentioned, », É, Ç, Ì and ¹ that can be matched to European MS., some of the latter symbols to ciphers of the time.

• Maybe for the same reason that people invented and re-invented You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. scripts: because writing Latin letters is too slow for recording normal speech in real time.
  
• Maybe because the language had phonemes that would be messy to Romanize. Like six different consonants with sounds similar to "sh", or clicks, or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., or tones...
  
• Maybe because he was a native You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  (or Georgian, Jew, Persian, Turk, Hindu ...) and thus would not have thought of using the Latin alphabet as model for his Burmese script?
  
• Maybe for the same reason that the Klingon alphabet does not resemble the Latin one: because he wanted to make it maximally cool and different?
  

Although I agree these can be valid explanations and cannot be ruled out, I still stand that the default position, given that the VMS seems to originate around the Alpian region, would be to resort to Romanization or their native script, just like the Jesuits did centuries later with many of the indigenuous languages in South America. I will concede I have not much to base this on other than taking the resemblance of Voynichese glyphs to Latin letterforms as not coincidental, and taking the usual "consensus" about the VMS provenance at face value. If you or anybody eventually manages to match the VMS to an East Asian language or some other exotic tradition, then hats off to you!