Artificial Intelligence · 19.08.2026, 04:10 UTC
A Glyph Is Not a Letter, a Token Is Not a Word, a Space Is Not a Space: What the Units of Voynichese Are Not
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Artificial Intelligence |
| Quelle | arXiv cs.CL ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 19.08.2026 UTC |
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arXiv:2608.17096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Voynich manuscript (Beinecke MS 408) is usually analysed on three unstated assumptions: that its glyphs are letters, that the strings between blanks are words, and that every blank is a word space. We test all three against the Zandbergen-Landini transliteration with matched prose, cipher, and pseudo-text controls and quire-level resampling. None holds, and the failures share a shape: the order in Voynichese sits at the edges of tokens and at graded boundaries between them, not in the succession of tokens themselves. Glyph regularity is too strong for one-to-one substitution of any tested plaintext (conditional entropy 2.7 bits against about 3.5 for Latin, Italian, and English) and resolves instead onto a quire-stable scale of recurrent multi-symbol units. Tokens form a plausible vocabulary, yet the identity of one token predicts the next by under 1% of token entropy, below every matched control (2-10%), while the glyphs at token edges share 0.2 bits of mutual information, more than in any prose control. Blanks fall into two regimes: the separators transcribers marked uncertain behave like word-internal junctures, are physically narrower on the page (AUC 0.905 from independent image coordinates, with the same sign in a small blind ink audit), and are crossed by learned units even when every space is erased before learning. This profile is also what discriminates. A published Voynich-imitating cipher and a self-citation text generator both reproduce the low entropy, the unit scale, the weak token order, and the null …