RE: about "The Voynich manuscript"

[mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Wed, 8 Mar 2000 Antoine.CASANOVA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> We consider a text which contains words as following:
> 
> TOTO TITI TOTA TITO TOTO TI TITO TA TATA
> 
> There are nine words but only seven vocables or terms.
> 
> TOTO TITI TOTA TITO TI TA TATA

It sounds like a vocable is what I would call a "unique word", which
implies that (as I thought) the analysis in the essay is ignoring the
relative frequencies of "vocables".  Is that a good thing to do?  I
daresay some of them will only occur once or twice in the whole document;
some of those may not even be genuinely different from others, just appear
different due to transcription errors or invalid assumptions on our part.
For instance: the letter "i", written in my rather messy cursive
handwriting, sometimes looks more like a loop and sometimes more like a
line.  A reader who didn't know the alphabet might easily call those
separate letters, which (it seems to me) would cause a big difference in
the results of this kind of analysis.

What happens if you take a sample of text in a natural language and apply
your analysis technique to it?  Does it produce obviously different
results?  What about a sample of text in an artificial language?  Does it
show the same characteristics that are being called evidence of
artificiality in the case of the VMS?

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