Stephen Carlson > 07-09-2020, 06:52 AM
Quote:You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
September 2020
The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th Century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language that underlies this document. We provide arguments for treating the document as natural language (rather than a medieval hoax) and show how we can make statistical arguments about the phonology, morphology, and structure of the document, even though the contents remain undecipherable.
Stephen Carlson > 07-09-2020, 07:52 AM
Bowern et al. 2020:5 Wrote:We also consider it unlikely that the The Voynich Manuscript is an ancient hoax. The cost associated with the production of such a manuscript and the number of people involved make it unlikely that it was created purely to deceive. A much smaller hoax would have served the same purpose with much less expense. Moreover, people who assume that the manuscript is a medieval gibberish hoax massively underestimate the amount of effort required to produce sustained language-like nonsense.5
Bowern et al. 2020:10 Wrote:The entropy of Voynichese is unlike any other language or script. Plausible manipulations of the script were investigated, including various shorthand abbreviations and devoweling the script. These do affect the character entropy, but not to the extent that would be required to bring Voynichese to the level of other languages. The only manipulation of this type that brings the conditional entropy to Voynich levels is systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions, such as conflating all vowels to a single character, recoding based on dividing characters into whether they occur in the first or second half of the alphabet, or sorting all characters in the word into alphabetical order.If these options for the character entropy are correct, I would say that it does not bode well for having a now-meaningful text (as opposed to a once-meaning text), since "systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions" and "sorting all characters in the word into alphabetical order" loses information. Perhaps the second option, "recoding based on dividing characters into whether they occur in the first or second half of the alphabet," does not lose information, depending on how it's done.
MarcoP > 07-09-2020, 08:13 AM
Quote:The entropy of Voynichese is unlike any other language or script. Plausible manipulations of the script were investigated, including various shorthand abbreviations and devoweling the script. These do affect the character entropy, but not to the extent that would be required to bring Voynichese to the level of other languages. The only manipulation of this type that brings the conditional entropy to Voynich levels is systematic conflation of phonemic distinctions, such as conflating all vowels to a single character, recoding based on dividing characters into whether they occur in the first or second half of the alphabet, or sorting all characters in the word into alphabetical order.
Quote:Full reduplication, in which the entire word is repeated, is also common in Voynich. However, it is still within the realm of plausibility for natural language texts. In Voynich A each word has a 0.84% chance of repeating while in Voynich B that chance is 0.94%. The range among the samples in our language corpus is 0.02%-4.8%, with an average of 0.63%
Quote:This repetitiveness is at least partly the result of the relatively limited set of character
combinations and the predictable structure of Voynich words.
Quote:[Some characters] closely resemble numbers: cf. q, d, y.l should be added to the list (it was a frequent variant shape of 4).
-JKP- > 07-09-2020, 03:08 PM
MichelleL11 > 07-09-2020, 04:03 PM
(07-09-2020, 08:13 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Of course there also are statements that do not match my own opinions, but I no longer believe everything I think, so they don't seem to be worth mentioning at the moment.
Emma May Smith > 07-09-2020, 06:05 PM
RenegadeHealer > 07-09-2020, 06:40 PM
Emma May Smith > 07-09-2020, 08:18 PM
Quote:As with the Zipfian word distribution, we find Voynich to be well within the expected values for natural language texts, and far from random gibberish. If the Voynich text is meaningless, its creators mimicked natural language in a sophisticated way.
Ruby Novacna > 07-09-2020, 08:45 PM
Torsten > 07-09-2020, 08:51 PM