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A family of grammars for Voynichese
- A family of grammars for Voynichese
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RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
oshfdk > 21-08-2025, 08:50 PM
(21-08-2025, 05:05 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.SLOT 1: ch sh y
SLOT 2: eee ee e q a
SLOT 3: o
SLOT 4: iii ii i d
SLOT 5: y p f k l r s t cth ckh cph cfh n m
Slot 4 looks interesting to me. I cannot think of a context in the manuscript where both i+ and d would appear valid, I wonder what lead to them being grouped together. Maybe this will be clarified in the per-section grammars. Since these grammars are mutually incompatible (perform poorly on other sections, as you said), probably the generic grammar is a mix of individual grammars.
Also interesting that o has its own slot. And y appears in two slots, looks like it's the only character that does this. As far as I remember, there used to be some ideas about there being two distinct y glyphs - word initial y and word ending y, that look almost the same, but function differently.
I think this work is very important for possible deciphering attempts. -
RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
Mauro > 21-08-2025, 10:53 PM
(21-08-2025, 08:50 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(21-08-2025, 05:05 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.SLOT 1: ch sh y
SLOT 2: eee ee e q a
SLOT 3: o
SLOT 4: iii ii i d
SLOT 5: y p f k l r s t cth ckh cph cfh n m
Slot 4 looks interesting to me. I cannot think of a context in the manuscript where both i+ and d would appear valid, I wonder what lead to them being grouped together.
Remember that being grouped together means they are alternative one to each other in that position. But d is interesting, I tried with many different characters allowed to move freely (r s t k l m n cth ckh...) and only 'd' did not cluster with all the other 'consonants'.
(21-08-2025, 08:50 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Maybe this will be clarified in the per-section grammars.
I hoped that too, but I could come to nothing which was satisfying (the d always seems to cluster by itself though, in both Currier languages, but in different positions). I cannot really say much at the moment, it's been a couples months since I last reasoned on the grammars (in the previous post I just wanted to report a negative), but as promised I'll rummage again into the data and give some examples and thoughts.
(21-08-2025, 08:50 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Since these grammars are mutually incompatible (perform poorly on other sections, as you said), probably the generic grammar is a mix of individual grammars.
Yes, surely it is. But I hoped that the grammars of the Currier B sections (which comprises the biggest part of the text) were more similar between themselves and to the 'whole VMS' grammar than they actually turned out to be. But it's also true that the looping mechanism does not help in understanding how much two grammars are different, ie. [a b c d] and [d a b c], when looped, are in practice the same grammar.
(21-08-2025, 08:50 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Also interesting that o has its own slot. And y appears in two slots, looks like it's the only character that does this. As far as I remember, there used to be some ideas about there being two distinct y glyphs - word initial y and word ending y, that look almost the same, but function differently.
I did not check much the behaviour of o, I'll give it a look tomorrow. y is interesting: all the 'best' grammars calculated on the whole VMS have an y both in the first and the last slot (hundreds of them) and I thought it gave a good support to the initial-y final-y theory. But incredibly, the grammars calculated on each section almost always have just one y. I don't know why: it can be just an artefact of the 'looping', or it may depend on the basic grammar structures I feeded to the Monte Carlo engine as seeds or on the VMS not following after all the inital-y final-y theory.
(21-08-2025, 08:50 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think this work is very important for possible deciphering attempts.
I thank you a lot but I'm not that optimistic at this point. Everything progressed well until I hit the usual wall of haziness and endless intractable complications, without any clear foothold in sigh. But at least I think I systematized a bit the field of slot grammars with the critique of the efficiency metric and I explored a bit a pretty interesting and fascinating grammar landscape. If anything of this can be of help to others, I'll be very glad.
For my part, I'll write down the results I got with the study of the sections in a future post (feel free to ask if you want more informations or raw data or whatever), then I'll go on with my current pausing of slot grammars and words chunkification studies, hoping to stumble on some new idea I am actually able to test, someday. -
RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
ReneZ > 22-08-2025, 12:39 AM
Just very briefly, I would see one of the main purposes of 'looping' to be to avoid having the same character in several slots. This does not seem to be achieved, and I suspect (just guessing) that this is the result of trying to achieve a too high coverage.
I think that one of the main problems with the Naibbe approach (which the slot approach does not suffer) is the need to be able to split words into parts, where the different possibilities for each part are somewhat limited in number. I don't think it can be done. Even a short slot system will easily generate large numbers of such apparent parts. No need to list them... -
RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
Mauro > 22-08-2025, 10:23 AM
(22-08-2025, 12:39 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just very briefly, I would see one of the main purposes of 'looping' to be to avoid having the same character in several slots. This does not seem to be achieved, and I suspect (just guessing) that this is the result of trying to achieve a too high coverage.
Trying to achieve too high a coverage could indeed be the problem. I remember you already remarked this here some time ago, and I actually made some tests by considering only the word types which appear a minimum number of times in the text (just hapax legomenas make up ~69% of the word types), which automatically decreases coverage (and may help with scribal/transcription errors). But I did not find anything which stood out as possibly significant.
(22-08-2025, 12:39 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think that one of the main problems with the Naibbe approach (which the slot approach does not suffer) is the need to be able to split words into parts, where the different possibilities for each part are somewhat limited in number. I don't think it can be done. Even a short slot system will easily generate large numbers of such apparent parts. No need to list them...
My approach too, ultimately, aimed to split words in chunks, in the hope that the chunks could be the basic units of the encoding method (or of the meaningless text generator, or whatever). I tried to do this with the Nbits metric, while the Naibbe approach used (if I'm not mistaken) a trial-and-error strategy. I would frame this generic approach like this: under the hypotheses VMS words are composed of chunks (which may, or may not, be true), is it possible to reconstruct objectively what those chunks are? It's not at all clear to me if this is mathematically possible and under which conditions, ie. a text like [qok qokedy edy qok edyqok edyedy qokqok] looks readily tonekizable as [qok, edy], while a jumble of random characters is obviously hopeless. The VMS lies somewhere between. Natural languages lie somewhere between too, and in this case they lend itself to be tokenized, in syllables (*), but I can't really say if this also the case for the VMS, or what the objective function could be, nor if it's possible to find a tokenization scheme which stands out above all others (which I failed to find with my looping grammars and Nbits). As you say, it might well be impossible.
(*) I actually made some tests of the 'looping slot grammar' approach on natural languages, using grammars inspired to the onset-nucleus-coda structure of phonetic syllables. Iirc it worked reasonably well for Latin and Italian, not as well with English. -
RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
Mauro > 23-08-2025, 07:28 PM
Sorry for the delay in posting the grammars, but I've caught a fever and just can't do it now. Be patient. -
RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
oshfdk > 23-08-2025, 09:58 PM
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RE: A family of grammars for Voynichese
Mauro > 11 hours ago
These are the better grammars I found (for the whole VMS and for the different sections):
The most notable thing is [l r s k t p f ckh cth cph cfh] always seem to cluster together (only [r] does not cluster, in the Balneological section). [n m] often go together with the other 'consonants', while [d] is always separated.
These are how the 'best' grammars parse some words into chunks (I had hoped the chunks always stayed the same, that would have been promising, but it did not happen):