Re: VMs: Further investigatio of folio f1r

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jan,
> 
> But seriously - I did compare the "letter" frequency of the VM transcript (EVA)  

	Don't forget, EVA was never intended to represent one
grapheme with one transcribed character, and it
doesn't.  EVA /iin/ is a case in point.  

> with letter frequency of
> medieval Latin by St. Augustin (in his Confessions, Book 1, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/latinconf/ ,
> and got interesting correlation at http://www.angelfire.com/electronic2/ohlas/VM/b16.htm
> 
> Since we can rely more on high frequency letters, the Latin there was much closer to the VM frequency than I ever expected. I also gave it to my colleague in  Germany to recalculate it independently, but he got the same results. We can also see that the medieval  English - or few other languages I tried  - are far off  - again in the area where it counts most.

	It's interesting that Latin comes close but not
English and the others.  

> Mind you, it was letter frequency,  not word frequency, which of course lead our linguists to look for unknown language :-). Now our observation would point to either monoalphabetic substitution cipher, OR transposition cipher (even multiple) OR the  combination of both. I think we gave up Latin too easy,

	As D'Imperio noted, others saw long ago that the
single-character distributions of Voynichese are close
to those of many European languages (though your study
is the most complete one).  Those early researchers
quickly found that they could not solve Voynichese as
monoalphabetic substitution.  The digraph distributions
are the ones that are really unusual, and those are
reflected in the second-order entropy.  

Dennis
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