You do have a good point though.

Take the hypothetical mapping

qokedy => “f”
dal => “ra”

so “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” could be part of the word “riffraff”. I think the GC transcription for that VMs sequence is “4ohc89 4ohc89 8ae 4ohc79 4ohc79″ which allows more possibilities. I tend to work only with GC, but my feeling is that it is over zealous – probably those 7s are really 8s.

Julian

One of the places where this kind of (actually very sensible) explanation falls a bit short is in Q13, home to the famous “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy”. There’s something a bit artificial going on there, however you look at it

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

If you group the Voynich words in this way, then the stats for the resulting plaintext word lengths look more realistic (but with a long tail, for which there could be several explanations). I am currently having fun exploring this theory with a GA, and will be sure to let you know when the manuscript has yielded its secrets to this approach

I suppose the first issue with all word-based theories is working out to what degree you believe a Voynichese “word” corresponds to a plaintext word. There are certainly many places where you can see (what I think Glen Claston termed) “half-spaces”, which you’d have to be particularly careful about when looking for any kind of word-based stats: inserted spaces would also disrupt any merry stats-gathering parties.

And the second issue is that if Voynichese words do (for the most part) correspond to plaintext words, and you also happen to subscribe to the notion that common pairs (such as qo, ol, or, al, ar, etc) encipher single tokens, then you’re left with the problem that the words are far too short to be real words – i.e. that some kind of shorthand “shortening” stage precedes the verbose stage. My own prediction, then, is that “4o” codes for “subscriptio” (i.e. expansion of the first letter), mid-word “8″ codes for “superscriptio” (i.e. syllable contraction), and word-final “9″ codes for “truncatio” (i.e. shortening of the overall string).

To be honest, I’d be a bit surprised if you could find many examples (i.e. above the level of chance) where part-words / ngrams gave a decent explanation for Voynichese’s properties – but all the same, please let me know how you get on!

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….

It’s certainly possible – and remember that Steve Ekwall believed that ‘ch’ denoted a ‘flip’ and the ‘e / ee / eee” characters denoted a ‘step’.

All the same, I think we would need to amass a whole new class of raw statistical evidence before we begin to look for stateful behaviour…

Cheers, ….Nick Pelling….