Re: VMs: Binomial distribution of word-length, etc...

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Nick Pelling wrote:
> 
> At 17:32 08/01/2004 -0500, Xod wrote:
> >I think that this finding here
> >http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-12-21-word-length-distr/
> >indicates the furthest advance so far.

	Yes, this is very interesting indeed!  

	Something I also thought of that may be relevant
there.  During our time period all orthographies were
quite lax.  The strict spelling rules of modern times
probably didn't take hold until after a couple
centuries of printing.  It seems to me the VMs, with
all its structure,  isn't consistent with this 

	On one hand, some spelling items seem quite fixed. 
Verbose cipher elements?  On the other hand, many words
differ by only a letter.  That would indeed be
consistent with a lax orthography.   

>  And there remains the
> nagging signficance of the 2 dialects.

	I've often thought that this could indicate a
homophonic system, one 
with multiple choices.  A and B would then be the
system as used by two different individuals.

> I've thought for a while now that a good explanation for this might be a
> combination of (a) an abbreviating private shorthand (which I suspect would
> approach a kind of binomial distribution as the sample-length goes up, but
> probably with a shorter word-length "peak"), and (b) a verbose cipher (to
> move the peak sideways, ie to the right again).
> 
> Unfortunately, I know of no sample statistics for (a)-like shorthand texts,

	There must be examples of modern shorthand texts,
although I don't know of any in convenient form.   I
suppose there are Unicode fonts for Gregg, etc.  Also,
what about Japanese texts with differing degrees of
kana-richness?

Dennis
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list