VMs: Hamptonese

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Great news on Hamptonese:  I am not alone!  

	Dr. Mark Stamp at San Jose State University
(California, USA) picked up on my work.  Here is his
website on Hamptonese:

http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/Hampton/hampton.html

Best of all, he made a poor unsuspecting grad student,
Ellen Le, transcribe all Hampton's diary!  The
transcription and images of all the diary are there.  

	Here is his paper on Hamptonese:

http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/stamp/Hampton/hamptonHMM/hamptonese.pdf

I'm digesting it all.  

	What I would like from someone here.  I think the next
step is to try to identify words in Hamptonese, since
Hamptonese doesn't have word divisions.  Does anyone
have software to identify and catalog repeated strings
in such a text?  Even better, to do that with
wildcards, since I'm quite sure Hampton's "spelling"
isn't consistent.  

	VMs relevance.  He has used a Hidden Markov Model
(HMM) to analyze Hamptonese.  I don't recall that
anyone has tried this on the VMs.  I myself don't have
experience with HMMs.  

	In the paper he discusses what the HMM showed for
single glyphs.  It seems to show that there are in fact
no vowels and consonants in Hamptonese.  The Sukhotin
algorithm shows vowels and consonants in Hamptonese,
but Jacques reminded me that it does not find "vowels";
it separates symbols into two sets, the member of each
tending to occur next to the members of the other.  But
it seems to me that is also what the HMM would find!
The results aren't completely unambiguous, so I am
thinking it over.  

	Those are first order results.  He also did runs for
higher orders but doesn't discuss the results.  Since
we have already done many morphological studies, of the
structure of Voynichese "words", I don't know what an
HMM would tell us.  

	Dr. Scott observes that the time period over which
Hampton wrote his diary is unknown, but may span a
decade.  The script becomes much clearer and much
easier to transcribe as the diary proceeds.   (Hampton
himself wrote page numbers, so there's no question of
subsequent rearrangement.)  Could there have been a
similar progression from Voynich B to Voynich A by the
same author?  

	Finally.  Note that Hampton most likely did not intend
concealment for whatever he wrote.  

Dennis

PS - For our newcomers, and those who don't remember.  
"Hamptonese" is the secret writing of James Hampton, an
African American visionary artist.  He left behind a
diary of writing in a script for which I have found no
precedents that are all definite.  There are also some
loose sheets in Hamptonese which are of considerable
interest.  Finally, he tagged each item on his
sculpture in English and Hamptonese - a potential
Rosetta Stone!   Here is my website on Hamptonese:

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/hampton/index.html

His diary is an obvious VMs analogue.
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