VMs: RE: wet blacnket?/

["Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've read Gordon Rugg's proposal on his website, though I haven't read the
Wired article.  He suggests that the Voynichese words were generated using a
three-part "grille" that allows you to assemble random words from a prefix,
a midfix and a suffix.  The words that result from his method look like (and
often are) valid Voynichese words.

I has previously been established (by Stolfi, I think) that Voynichese words
were composed of a prefix, a midfix, and a suffix.  Gordon Rugg's proposal
gives us a plausible piece of technology that could have been used to
generate those words at the time the manuscript is believed to have been
written.  I'm not sure what else it gives us.  (Maybe someone can add
something I missed).

Similar technology could be used to generate "words" from any language, if
you were to start with an understanding of the basic makeup of the words.
For example, "Japanese" or "Hawaiian" words could be generated from a table
of valid syllables, or "Chinese" words could be generated from a table of
onsets and rhymes.  If you tuned your algorithm well enough a high
percentage of the words you generate would be real words in your target
language.  Rugg has spent some time tuning his algorithm, and he himself
notes that "In addition, this method can be used to produce more complex
effects than are found in the Voynich manuscript, such as apparent vowel
harmony, apparent case endings analogous to those in Latin, and short
phrases; more creatively, it can be used to produce effects analogous to
English prepositional phrases, where two words may co-occur though separated
by intervening text."

In my opinion, simply because you can produce artificial text that will fool
a non-speaker, that doesn't mean any text that fools a non-speaker is
artificial.  The question with Voynichese is:  Was there ever a speaker?

By way of demonstration, I offer the following two poems.  One of them is an
obscure medieval Chinese poem (written without tones), and the other is a
randomly generated text following the rules of Chinese morphology (with
rhymes and syllable count enforced).  Anyone who speaks no Chinese will not
be able to tell the difference.  Even people who speak Chinese will probably
be hard pressed to tell the difference, unless they recognize the words for
the four seasons:

chun you bai hua qiu you yue
xia you liang feng dong you xue
ruo wu xian shi gua xin tou
bian shi ren jian hao shi jie

shuang che kuang ran fu yi de
ru zu wei xing tu xiang he
lai hou fu tong dui chuang hou
tong wen yin liao dou bing fo

Brian Tawney



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