-JKP- > 03-06-2018, 06:10 PM
(03-06-2018, 05:51 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
(It's unlikely that a medieval scholar would use more than one character for a null). But the results will of course depend on transcription, so different transcriptions need be considered.
Anton > 03-06-2018, 06:23 PM
Helmut Winkler > 04-06-2018, 10:20 AM
(03-06-2018, 01:52 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.To comment upon Helmut's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but not introduce offtopic in that thread.Just to show what I mean: There is a good example in the scribal abbreviations article of the English Wikipedia of a highly abbreviated text. I don't pretend to know much about these statistics stuff, but I can't imagine there would not be a considerable difference
Anton > 04-06-2018, 02:52 PM
Helmut Winkler > 04-06-2018, 06:05 PM
(04-06-2018, 02:52 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Helmut, the idea in a nutshell is that certain quantitative parameters can be calculated over a text of a reasonable length, which parameters would more or less systematically depend (with various degrees of dependence) upon the language, the time period (e.g. 18th century vs nowadays), the topics, the author (the author's personal style of expression). The so-called "character entropy" is one of such parameters (actually there are different flavours of character entropy, such as h1 or h2, but I don't touch that here). Basically they indicate how efficiently the script (the alphabet) is used to convey information. The problem with the Voynich manuscript is that information entropies calculated for the Voynichese text are notably lower than those calculated over plain texts in European languages (not only European, but we discuss the Latin script here). This strongly suggests that the Voynichese is not just a plain rendering of a plain text in a fancy script. Instead, some operations (unknown to us) must have been performed over the plain text before it was rendered in the Voynichese script. One of the operations that one could perform over a text is abbreviation. But, as I indicated above through a way of an example, abbreviating a Latin text does not bring character entropy closer to what is exhibited in the Voynich, instead, it brings it away from that. This makes sense, since with abbreviation you begin to convey the same information even in a more efficient manner (while Voynich does quite the opposite).
If you are further interested in the concepts, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. we have a tutorial on that, which assumes no prior knowledge, it's still unfinished (I ever can't find time!) but I'd say it's 90% ready or the like.
Anton > 13-04-2019, 01:01 AM