Hi Koen,
thank you for digging this out! I still find the subject fascinating, and your recent posts about Nicander have rekindled my interest.
I tried to recover the scripts I used four years ago and make the results somehow readable. I attach the results. Since I must have altered the code since then, I am not sure this is 100% consistent, but it should be close enough. I used the Takahashi transliteration.
Each label is compared with what apparently is the corresponding paragraph. This matching allows for some variation between the two words.
These are the main variations I allowed for:
- a label matches any longer word that contains it
- 'k' and 't' are treated as equivalent
- all gallows are equivalent to the corresponding benched gallows
- 'o', 'a' and 'y' (Stolfi's "circles") are treated as equivalent
- 'm' is equivalent to 'r'
- 'l' in the label can be absent in the matching word
These variations are partly arbitrary and partly based on analyses done by others (e.g. Stolfi, Emma). It can be argued that they are not enough, e.g. one could have a more aggressive treatment of word-endings, in order to have more chances to handle inflection. All in all, there are not so many "pharma" paragraph, and a careful manual analysis is a viable option in this case.
(14-03-2020, 11:15 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that the text should repeat labels, especially since most of these pages are really crowded. They would probably want to avoid redundancy.
When discussing likelihood, there always is the problem of how to extimate it. One can ask himself: do labels in medieval manuscripts typically appear in the text? I think they do. An hypothesis could be that the VMS should behave like other manuscripts and one could then see if this is the case (it does not appear to be).
Another possibility is the pessimistic approach: since all attempts to find structure in Voynichese consistently fail, one can say that experiments like this are very unlikely to be successful. I am more and more convinced that it is so. There could be features of the text (e.g.
qokedy qokeedy qokoy qotedy otedy qokedy qokedy) that suggest that avoiding redundancy was not the main concern of the author(s), but who knows?