Anton > 13-04-2021, 02:07 PM
(13-04-2021, 01:46 AM)obelus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-04-2021, 08:14 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-04-2021, 05:41 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is perfectly possible for a cipher to decrease entropy.
It would be of great interest to have a historical example of this.
Morse code is a fine example. The alphabetic representation of English is highly redundant at 4 bits/character; Shannon himself demonstrated by experiment that the information content of written English is in the range 0.6-1.3 bits/character. By exploiting the relative frequencies of English letters, Morse code compresses text to approximately 2.5 bits/character.
geoffreycaveney > 13-04-2021, 03:04 PM
(13-04-2021, 09:40 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The fact that 'þe' is equivalent to 'the' is quite obvious, since the word is so frequent. Once you understand this, it's easy to see that (like in modern English) the article appears at the start of noun phrases and is typically followed by either a noun or an adjective (þe roote, þe flour, þe ȝonge sonne, þe Ram). Like in modern English, 'his' behaves similarly to 'the' (his schowres swoote, his swete breeth, his halfe cours). Like in modern English, 'and' connects two grammatical structures of the same kind (e.g. sentences or noun phrases). You can basically start from function words, which are almost identical to modern English, and work from there.
I can have trouble with the meaning of words like 'schowres', 'holte' or 'heetħ', but identifying part-of-speech categories is almost always straightforward, so it's easy to keep track of grammar, even when some of the meaning is lost.
The true Voynich translation will allow us to do just that: start from function words, identify basic grammatical structures and finally get to word meanings and translation.
The fantasy that language structure is a modern invention cannot possibly lead to anything interesting.
MarcoP > 13-04-2021, 03:23 PM
(13-04-2021, 01:32 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.if the transcription makes a basic parsing mistake in the 8th line of one of the most famous passages in all of English literature, it does not inspire confidence in the statistical accuracy of the rest of the transcription and a word frequency analysis based on it.
Quote:The Norman Blake Editions is a series of online editions which present full diplomatic transcriptions of the key, surviving manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
geoffreycaveney > 13-04-2021, 04:20 PM
Pardis Motiee > 13-04-2021, 07:49 PM
tavie > 13-04-2021, 08:48 PM
-JKP- > 13-04-2021, 09:01 PM
Quote: ...if I were world dictator, I'd ban anyone from submitting a solution unless they've done a rough translation of at least 20 pages from across the manuscript....
Pardis Motiee > 13-04-2021, 09:59 PM
geoffreycaveney > 13-04-2021, 10:26 PM
tavie > 14-04-2021, 12:47 AM
(13-04-2021, 09:01 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm pretty sure if someone could "decrypt" (I'm using the term loosely) a full paragraph, that it would generalize in one way or another (conceptually if not specifically) to the rest of the manuscript