Re: Voynich research needs

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jacques Guy wrote:
> 
> If the manuscript is a hoax, I have a gut feeling
> that there should be some way of finding out, of
> proving it. But again, I wonder: is there a
> continuum from real, meaningful text to glossolalia?
> Perhaps there is. This question has never been
> seriously addressed -- I do not mean regarding the
> VMS, but in general. 

	It seems to me that there ought to be.  The continuum
might be:

glossalalia -             semantically empty, except
for expressing an ecstatic state of consciousness
pidgin languages -        has meaning, but cannot
express very elaborate ideas.
early creoles -           much more meaning and
expressive power.  Only needs an established
oral/written                                 tradition
to have the semantic power of full natural languages
full natural languages -  French, Chinese, Russian,
Hungarian, etc.  Includes late creoles; English is 
	                     probably a very late creole.

> It could be a hoax, and still
> be meaningful -- like Helen Smith's "Martian" 

	Helene Smith's "Martian" is not a hoax but a very
special case. She produced it under hypnosis, without
conscious volition.  It's rather like past-life
memories or alien abduction memories.  (I believe that
Kelley's Enochian is another example of this.)  Her
"Martian" is certainly an early creole, and probably a
late creole; it would have most of the expressive power
of French.

> So, I believe that none of [1], [2], and [3] is
> the case. In my view, we simply do not know
> enough about language to tell where the VMS
> stands. I don't know much about cryptography,
> but the repetitive nature of the text, its low
> entropy mean to me that -- *IF* it is a cipher:

	I think we've proven quite sufficiently that the low
entropy is due to the heavily paradigmatic structure of
Voynichese words.  In my view, the low entropy is now a
nonissue.  For the newcomers, read my paper:

Understanding the Second-Order Entropies of Voynich
Text
http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/voy/mbpaper.htm

	D'Imperio's book gives Tiltman's paradigm for Voynich
words; his paradigm accounts for perhaps 60% of Voynich
words.

Robert Firth's Voynichese paradigm accounts for about
80%:
http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich/firth/24.txt

and Stolfi's latest paradigm accounts for nearly all:
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/

> But then, the plaintext would be very short, and
> what about the label?
> 
> That is why, in my cryptographic ignorance,
> I do not think it can be a cipher proper.
> Simple substitution, yes possibly, but beyond
> that, no definitely.

	To amplify my comment above, a verbose cipher, one
that probably substitutes several Voynich letters for a
single phoneme.  But definitely not a cipher in the
usual sense of the term.

> Take the Codex Seraphinianus. Its page-numbering
> system (base 21) has been cracked. Its author, Luigi
> Serafini, claims that the text is not gibberish.
> Ivan Derzhanski has had a go at analysing it...
> wait, let me do a search... there:
> 
> http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html

	I can't reach the link at the moment.  I thought that
you (Frogguy) had decided that the Codex Seraphinianus
had more characters than an alphabet or syllabary.  Is
it then a morphographic system, like Chinese?

> In my eyes, it is a very similar problem, and
> I am glad that the editor of Dr Dobb's Journal
> left in my remark that this (the VMS) is the
> sort of problems which we must know how to solve
> if we are ever to make contact with  alien
> intelligences (extraterrestrial or not -- we very
> possibly have some right under our noses now).

	I agree.  That's a selling point for our efforts, in
any case!  Could we get SETI funding?  ;-)

Dennis