VMs: Re: word boundaries

["Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Nick Pelling" <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 13 July 2004 09:39


>
> 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?
>

The EVA o is the most problemmatic for any solution to resolve. It ranks
very high in
frequency. As you show otedy breaks an otherwise stable verbose construct.
The EVA
o does this in many other places too. When selecting verbose groups it
sometimes
seems that arbitrary choices are forced upon you.

> 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?
>

This is long overdue. Oh how I hate EVA o!

Jeff

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


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