[Interview] Upcoming Voynich conversation at the Beinecke

[MichelleL11]

Claire talks about segmenting Eva differently in order to manipulate entropy. Is this a separate paper that has been published? I would be interested in the results since I have made identical attempts myself (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

@Koen G My impression was that the data she presented (and the comments about segmenting Eva) were the underlying data sets for the comments in the Bowern and Lindemann publication (Annual Review of Linguistics, l’m working off the preprint) where they state at p. 10, l. 1 “Plausible manipulations of the script were investigated, including various shorthand abbreviations and devoweling of the script. These do affect character entropy, but not to the extent to bring Voynichese to the level of other languages.  The only manipulation of this type that brings the conditional entropy to Voynich levels is the systemic 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.”

But l definitely agree that this kind of data could support a publication on its own!

[Koen G]

Yeah, they have a lot of work ahead of them 

Seeing how Lisa and Claire approach the VM in a reasonable scientific way is a real joy, and I really hope they keep it going. I also hope that one day, they will be joined by someone trained in the analysis of imagery, but this is probably wishful thinking. High risk, low reward...

[lurker]

In the video Lisa says that the order and direction of strokes within each glyph allowed her to distinguish between different scribes? But isn't EVA n always written with a single stroke from the bottom up?

[Aga Tentakulus]

Man is a creature of habit.
The pattern is probably in the sequence.

But this statement gives me an important clue to deciphering it.

Things are not always what they seem to be.