Re: VMs: word boundaries

[Eric <mynumberis2000@xxxxxxxxx>]

During my very optimistic beginnings :) I was hoping
that the collocation analysis would not only resolve
where the word boundaries were, but also what the
letters where (starting with EVA as the most fine
grained). I ran into the "th" issue in English quickly
- by far, most of the time "th" should be considered a
single letter in English, but not always... and that
"not always" is the killer.

I think I'll run a collocation on the letters in EVA
and post the results, just to see what sort of
insights others might have - I might be missing
something really obvious.

Eric


--- Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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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