Re: VMs: Voynich analysis

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I think it would be a great step forward if you
> can even prove (or  disprove) that the word 
> boundaries in the ciphertext correspond to word 
> boundaries in the plaintext. 

The idea that spaces might not be word boundaries
came up because the spaces always tend to follow
(and precede) certain characters with high
probability. 
It is not difficult to show that this qualitative
statement is actually incorrect (quantitatively). 

So without a good reason to suspect that spaces
are not word boundaries, combined with a remarkable 
lack of documents where spaces are not word
boundaries (*), the odds that they are, are very
high.
  (*) Arabic is a counter-example, but then look
      at labels in Arabic documents. They do have
      spaces whereas the VMs labels hardly do.

Jeff's idea is confronted by the old problem
that the very similarly looking Herbal-A and 
Herbal-B pages (which are even interleaved in 
the document) exhibit very different vocabularies.

Cheers, Rene


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list