Re: VMs: voynich dice game ... sunday thoughts

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

  > [John Koontz:] So, while the Arabic situation warns us that spaces
  > - or at least interruptions in the flow of connection of glyphs -
  > can be inserted by rules other than "word division," it doesn't
  > seem to apply specifically to Voynich script's word divisions.

Here are three arguments that the Voynichese "word spaces"
are indeed word separators: 

  (1) Almost all glyphs are separated from their neighbors by a gap.
  So we are not talking about connected vs unconnected characters as
  in Arabic, but between wider and narrower spaces. While some of
  these width variations may be just optical artifacts due to the
  shape of the adjoining letters, on the whole the distinction between
  narrow and wide spaces is quite marked and seems obviously
  intentional. So, assuming that the narrow spaces are character
  separators, what are the wide spaces if not word separators?
  
  (2) Since line breaks do not occur at random, it seems reasonable to
  assume that they occur mostly at word boundaries. The statistical
  context of the "word spaces" (i.e. the probability distribution of
  the two adjacent characters) is fairly similar to that of line
  breaks -- provided we allow for the fact that certain charaters like
  EVA "m" (abbreviations?) have a marked preference for the end of
  lines. Therefore "word spaces" are also mostly at word boundaries,
  too.
  
  (3) The structure and statistics of the "labels" are fairly similar
  to those of the text "words", and most labels contain no "word
  spaces". It seem therefore reasonable to assume that those labels
  are single words of the language, and that the same is true of the
  text "words".
  
Note that (3) argues against the "word spaces" having been inserted
by context-sensitive rules, just to fool code-breakers.

Of course the words could actually be numbers in some Roman-like
number system.  

All the best,

--stolfi

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