VMs: word boundaries

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Eric,

At 20:35 12/07/2004 -0700, Eric wrote:
> However, I haven't tried colocation likelihood
> measurements on gibberish or heavily encrypted text
> (by that i mean, a simple substitution cipher would
> behave the same as plain text for collocations). I
> would guess in these cases the number of significant
> collocations would drop, but by how signficantly I
> don't know. I did run collocation likelihoods once on
> the VMS text (see my long message about concentrating
> on known languages) and didn't see any anomolies (the
> character combinations we always see together - 4o -
> show up).

If Voynichese is based in part on a verbose cipher (where certain digraphs 
('diglyphs'?) like "qo" ('4o'), 'dy', 'or', 'ol', etc code for special 
tokens), then you might also be able to tease out interesting results from 
it using these kinds of analyses.

However, the analytical problem is that the basic concept of "letter" 
becomes rather amorphous: for example, it seems that in many/most/all 
cases, Voynichese "o" has no independent meaning - so any analysis that 
relies on a concept of a "state" associated with that "letter" will be 
misleading. Take a basic pair of words like "otedy" and "qotedy": I 
personally have little doubt that the latter should probably be parsed as 
"qo-t-e-dy" (or perhaps "qo-te-dy") - but what about the former?

If all "o"s are misleading (that is, if free-standing "o" has no meaning), 
then we should expect to parse it as "ot-e-dy" - but IIRC other analyses 
suggest that "tedy" is some kind of word base here, with "qo-" and "o-" as 
prefixes.

Perhaps you might consider how to apply your box of tricks to test this "o 
is not a real letter" hypothesis?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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