NickPelling wrote:Koen: I’ve been saying for some time that I think the next big “step up” in Voynichese study will come when some clever person finds a way to map between A patterns and B patterns, i.e. to normalize the two (errrm… actually several) parts into a single thing.

But to do this properly, you need to parse A and B, build letter contact tables for them, and then build state machine ‘grammars’ that capture how the two behave – the stuff that’s the same is probably the same, but the stuff that’s different probably involves something that was written as XXX in A being written as YYY in B. Normalizing A/B would involve being able to say “XXX == YYY”. However, this rests on the back of parsing, letter contact tables, and state machines, which (I think) steganographica tricks are disrupting. So I’m still not at all sure how we get over all the technical hurdles to get to a state where we can approach this in a rigorous enough way.

But perhaps some of these XXX == YYY equivalences can be worked out even without all that machinery. For example, I have long strongly wondered whether daiin daiin patterns in A reappear (in some way) as qotedy qokedy patterns in B. Clearly, both involve repetitive “bla-bla-bla” word sequences that are hard to reconcile with either linguistic readings or crypto theories. And given that I’ve previously speculated whether daiin daiin might be enciphering Arab numerals, it would be logical for me to speculate whether qotedy qokedy might be doing the same (but in a different way). Just a thought.

1. the two ch-words that are most frequent in HerbalA (chol, chor) have smaller and smaller frequencies has you move towards B;
   
2. symmetrically, there are words that are rare in A and progressively more frequent in B (cheey, chckhy);
   
3. there are words that do not appear in A and are frequent in B (chedy, chdy); this asymmetry could be useful in choosing the direction of the mapping A->B or B->A;
   
4. chey is somehow constant across sections.