Re: VMs: Odd Thoughts

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rafal wrote:

> I remember a sentence from an exercise polishing
> one's grasp of conditionals:
> 
> If the sentence that had "had had" had had "had",
> it would have been correct.

I like it. It can be expanded recursively ad
infinitum (although, as a one-time programmer,
I would have a problem with the ambiguity of
the nested quotes).

One of Dennis' other points was related to the
thing I wrote about character entropy and word
entropy.

One possible explanation for the feature observed 
would be that the words are composed using a
number system. Another would be a 'constructed
language' a-la Friedman's proposal.

None of this works for all words in the Voynich
MS. In fact, none of the proposed schemes work
for all words (not even Stolfi's very generic
core-mantle-crust grammar). But all work for some
significant fraction. Perhaps the VMs is composed
of two types of words: 'systematic' ones and
'non-systematic' ones. 
I know that this is a very vague concept. It
could mean many different things.
For example:
many words are written in one (systematic)
language, but foreign words are 'transliterated'.
or:
all common words are represented as a number
but stranger words are represented in some other
way.
or:
some words have meaning and others are nulls.
or in fact:
some words contain null characters and
others don't.

This could all be applied to two different
situations: the text is meaningful, or it is not.

Cheers, Rene


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