VMs: Odd Thoughts

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Gabriel posed two alternatives for the entropy of
Voynichese:

1) The system is verbose.  This would be inconsistent
with the word length.  Possible explanations: The words
are actually syllables of the plaintext language. The
plaintext language is comprised of short base words
that combine into larger units, like Chinese may be.  

2)  The system is lossy.  This would be the case with
Nick's "aggressive abbreviation".  

	Are these the only alternatives?  Rene's study "The
VMs: From Character Entropy to Word Entropy" says it
might not be.  Neither alternative seems consistent
with the large number of Voynichese words - although a
small number of words make up much of the text.  

	Might we use a style analyzer program to compare A and
B?  Might a handwriting analyst be able to tell us
anything?  

	I read Gordon Rugg's article.  I'm still thinking
about it.  The strong point of his method: it explains
the line structure.  One of the weak points: it ignores
the first line of every paragraph.  

	One hears that one never sees strings of the same word
repeated in natural languages.  This is not so.  The
commonly used example "the the the" is a poor one. 
"the" is a determiner, only one of which may precede a
noun.   One sees multiple adjectives: "an old, old
story"; multiple adverbs: "a very, very bad book"; and
multiple verbs are not unknown: "Now you've done it,
you've done, done, done it."  These are not very
common, but I don't think they're very common in the
VMs. Am I right about that?  Also.  Does one see
repeated syllables in Chinese?  

	I've never closely studied the Zipf's laws, but I've
always been somewhat skeptical of them.  In days of
old, engineers had a saying: "Anything makes a straight
line if you plot it on log-log paper."  In other words,
everything, to some extent, follows a power law - which
is what the Zipf's laws are.  

	I see absolutely no influence of Chinese script on
Voynichese script, nor Chinese or Far Eastern imagery
in the VMs.  Voynichese certainly might be Chinese
written in a phonemic form, but it wouldn't be
consistent with that.  

	The new information surfacing about Dee, Kelley, and
/Horc'icky/de Tepenecz/Sinapius is most interesting! 
It puts much of our collateral information in a new
perspective. [I hope de Tepenecz was no relation to
Vlad Tepescu!  ;-) ]

	I do NOT think our basic statistics on the VMs should
be in EVA.  EVA's authors never intended it to
represent a single Voynichese grapheme with a single
transcribed grapheme.  Currier or CurEVA would be
better choices for base statistics.   

Dennis
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