Re: VMs: A couple of questions.

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Welcome, Smári!  Let me add a few things.

Elmar Vogt wrote:

> In general people think though that the letter count is fairly low -- about
> 20 different, with some fairly rare "weirdos". Compare this to 24-30 latin
> letters, or somewhat above 30 for cyrillic.

	Rene Zandbergen came up with a number from statistical 
methods.  I think it was about 23.

> > 	- are the letter assignments made by transcriptors based on anything
> > other than whim?

	As Elmar said, in all the transcription systems, the 
letters are chosen to resemble the shape of the Voynich 
characters, for ease of use.  The EVA system is also 
designed to be somewhat pronounceable, and in addition to 
allow the decomposition of some characters into smaller 
units, if one wishes.  No system makes any assumptions about 
the sound values or semantic values of the characters, since 
there is too little to go on.

> Entropy analyses seem to indicate a relatively low information content (high
> predictability) for the VM. This would point to --
>
> *) It's a polynesian language,

	But consonant-vowel patterns of the VMs don't match 
Polynesian languages.  (We have applied vowel detection 
algorithms to the text.)

http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/voynich/image/sukhotin.gif

*) It's in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.

> *) We don't transcribe properly, but miss important details, or
>
> *) It's not a letter-based script at all.

 *) It's in some sort of highly structured, verbose cipher.
> Welcome to the whacky world of the VM! :-)

	Indeed!

> > 	- What information is available besides that which is on voynich.nu?
>
> http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/voynich.html
>
> Holds a number of links.
>
> Also, don't forget to check out the Wikipedia page, which is very good,
> IMHO!

	This is the most complete set of links available:

http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/

Cheers,
Dennis

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