Re: VMs: vms sentences

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dennis wrote:

> I think the way is with a
> Voynich Wiki. 
(snip)

> 	Ideally everyone should put their Voynich pages on it,
> and we 
> could then set up some sort of search engine, if there
> isn't one already.  
I like the idea of having some central respository of VM information (or 
at least pointers to the many useful sites already in existence), but I 
was thinking of something else. Just as you grab a math reference book 
to look up a certain integral or the value of a function, it would be 
nice to have a sort of "data book" of raw VM statistics that could be 
referred to easily.

Examples of the types of statistics that might be included are:
   - letter frequencies by page/by type of page/ by language
   - references to all occurrences of repeated words or phrases.
   - statistics on occurrences of gallows characters
   - a word frequency list
   - a KWIC index (concordance) of the VM
   - word ending frequencies
      etc.
  
Then, for example, rather than referring in general to "triple 
repetitions of words" it would be easy to examine all the actual 
occurrences to look for some pattern.

By the way, to do this it would be useful to choose one (or more) 
transcription(s) of the VM as a sort of "reference text", which would be 
included in the databook and used as the basis for all statistics, with 
the understanding that there are legitimate differences in opinion which 
would have some effect on the resulting statistics. (Without "putting a 
stake in the ground" somewhere, however, it is impossible to do more 
than talk in generalities.)

Then, as new theories arise, additional statistics to investigate them 
could be generated and added to the "data book".

Regards,

Bruce


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