MarcoP > 15-02-2023, 10:49 AM
nablator > 15-02-2023, 11:37 AM
(10-02-2023, 04:03 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am aware that perfect reduplication is a special case of a more general phenomenon.I would like to use a metric that works when word boundaries are unknown, because they often are, if they are not completely fictitious (a possibility).
Searcher > 15-02-2023, 08:59 PM
(15-02-2023, 10:49 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Yulia,Hi Marco!
it's great to read from you!
The hypothesis you discuss addresses one of the major problems of Voynichese and it has been put forward in the past (e.g. by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., but I am sure by others as well).
A first problem I see is that repetition is quite pervasive in the VMS. Where do we stop throwing stuff away? Your example includes a repetition with edit:2 distance (from9 9from). Is that the maximum edit distance for irrelevant words? Edit distance (which I am using here to keep things simple) is a totally anachronistic way to decide what to keep and what to dump, what should be used instead? In a sequence of similar words, do we keep the first one, the last one or there is some different criterium?
Addsamuels > 15-02-2023, 10:35 PM
(15-02-2023, 08:59 PM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.abbreviated.I think you are getting closer, but I don't agree with the character Q, (for example it's common knowledge that the next character after Q is an o, or in other words, Qo pairs> far outstrip other Q? pairs, where ? is an other character not wildcard)
Addsamuels > 15-02-2023, 10:57 PM
Koen G > 17-02-2023, 10:07 AM
Searcher > 18-02-2023, 11:51 AM
(17-02-2023, 10:07 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree with Marco's explanation. It is very tempting to "trim the fat" off of Voynichese, and see what's left. But there are many ways to do this, and the result will be that you're still left with the same problem, only on a different level.
Quote:It might help to compare with another language. Let's say we don't know what Latin is, we find a Latin text and suspect someone tampered with it by adding all the frequent endings. We slash aggressively, removing everything that resembles a suffix.I think most people understand that thoughtlessly removing all common endings will not lead to anything good, since all we get is frequent beginnings. Why not continue to search the rules? Is it really a hopeless exercise and does not lead to any positive results? So what are we doing here?
Quote:Now if we do the same to Voynichese, the scenario will be completely different. We will reduce our phoneme inventory even further, because "iin"-clusters and "q" will need to disappear entirely.Why "-iin", but not "-dy"? Note that "-n" and "-dy" are similar with that fact that in the most cases they are preceded with a character that often is multiplied (e, ee, eee, eeee, i, ii, iii, iiii).
Quote:And keep in mind that the apparent phoneme inventory of Voynichese is already smaller than most people realize, because several characters are infrequent, so it operates on a relatively small core of characters. Now of course one could slash material until benched gallows etc become relatively frequent, and then recombine what is left into words.I think that without q and sh, I can get 21 - 22 letters in the normal ratio for an ordinary language. Of course, in this case, it will be necessary to make certain substitutions, but according to certain conditions. I'm still working on it (unfortunately, I can't devote much time to research right now), but I hope to finish it in the near future. Of course it doesn't mean that my complex of actions will lead to a positive relult in decyphering, but the fact that the percentage of letters in the text is approaching the norm makes me happy. It remains to be seen how these substitutions affect the n-gram ratio. I need to note that these actions is not something unique, some of them were quite often discussed on the forum. But, whatever one may say, it turns out that with these methods some Voynich vords will have to be combined as parts of one word. It may turn out that some labels don't contain full words, but abbreviated ones.
In short, my main concern with this kind of approach is what your phoneme inventory would end up looking like, and how you're going to get around 20 characters.
nablator > 18-02-2023, 01:30 PM
(15-02-2023, 10:57 PM)Addsamuels Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I can't add my ''proofs'' (or more info) due to there being no native image support.There is an "attachments" box where you can upload an image when you post a new reply. Or you can use a free image hosting website like goopics.net, no account needed.
Koen G > 18-02-2023, 05:24 PM
(18-02-2023, 11:51 AM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think most people understand that thoughtlessly removing all common endings will not lead to anything good, since all we get is frequent beginnings. Why not continue to search the rules? Is it really a hopeless exercise and does not lead to any positive results? So what are we doing here?
Searcher > 18-02-2023, 06:04 PM
(18-02-2023, 05:24 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Oh, it wasn't an objection to your Latin example indeed. Maybe I put quotes not too well. I rather confirmed your phrase from the next quote, adding my observation, as I've also tried to delete "-dy"s, "-edy's or "-iin's and saw that the result was "many frequent beginnings".(18-02-2023, 11:51 AM)Searcher Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think most people understand that thoughtlessly removing all common endings will not lead to anything good, since all we get is frequent beginnings. Why not continue to search the rules? Is it really a hopeless exercise and does not lead to any positive results? So what are we doing here?
My point was kind of the opposite. If we thoughtlessly remove all common endings and beginnings from Latin, what we are left with is still relatively good. It won't be a real language and information will be lost, but in almost all metrics you can imagine it will behave like a normal language. Word length might start looking abnormal, as an abnormal amount of words will be very short. But most words in this text will still look viable. With Voynichese you cannot do anything like that.
Quote:It's true I've been looking for ways to optimize certain stats, but I did so without taking the "workability" of the system into account. What I did was check if the information within voynichese words could be expressed in such a way that entropy becomes normal (it barely does). But this was a purely statistical exercise that did not aim to discover a workable encryption system.I try to do this, too. I want to reach higher perfection of my experiment, and I'll share it later. Maybe, it's just an exercise, but still... who knows where it will lead to.
For example, a workable version might be that each Voynichese word stands for one plaintext letter that has been padded in a way to make it look like a word. So if one knows how to read the relevant letters, one can easily ignore the padding and retrieve the meaning.