VMs: Re: RE: Re: Information lost!

["Ger" <ger.hungerink@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marke wrote:

> There may be a lot of doubled words (~300), but there are even more
> wordpairs where the difference is only one "character" (~1900), and
> this is too many to be explained solely by the similarity of VMs
> words.


Given the statistical structure of the Voynichese, I think it is a striking 
feature, but no surprise. I depart here assuming that your 300 hundred refer 
to the whole manuscript, and the 1900 to the lexicon, each word once.

The VMs contains very few long words, uses relatively few symbols with a 
high frequency, and has very strict rules for the succesion of these 
symbols. To get a large lexicon under these conditions it is inevitable that 
many words differ by only one character.

What if someone had a program lying around that could easily be adapted to 
simulate this? It would be very instructive to learn whether 1900 near equal 
words could be explained by "chance" alone. A page that might be of help is 
e.g.: http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/Notes/017/Note-017.html

If however it shows that these constraints are not sufficient to force that 
many near equals, we will have to look for an explanation. More rules, or 
something concealed in the language itself.

Ger







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