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https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian

Tools for decipherment.
https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian

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Tools for decipherment.

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# Enochian



This project provides some tools to do exploratory phonological comparisons

between texts in unknown languages and entries one or more lexicons.



You may see the results of a recent test run of the software for the Voynich Manuscript

[here](http://chalcolith.github.io/enochian).



## Introduction



The initial goal is to investigate whether a particular theory of a possible

phonological interpretation of the script in the Voynich manuscript can be used

to find possible lexical matches in various machine-readable lexicons.



[Stephen Bax](https://stephenbax.net/?page_id=11) in 2014 proposed some

phonological values for various Voynich characters, based on identifications of

plant and star names in some of the illustrated pages. [Derek

Vogt](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ/videos) has

elaborated on this work and proposed a more extensive phonological scheme. In

addition, he has analyzed the phonological inventory of the scheme and proposed

that the language of the Voynich manuscript is based on some variety of Romani.



At present, the Enochian software tool can take arbitrary lines from the

[Reed-Landini-Stolfi

Interlinear](http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-12-28-interln16e6/)

transcription of the Voynich manuscript, encode each word as a sequence of

vectors in phonological feature space, and then search the

[RomLex](http://romani.uni-graz.at/romlex/) lexicon of Romani and the

[Shabda-Sagara Sanskrit

dictionary](http://www.sanskrit-lexicon.uni-koeln.de/scans/csldoc/dictionaries/shs.html),

using dynamic time warping to look for for the closest phonological sequence

matches.



You can see a sample of this kind of flow in the

[voynich.json](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/samples/voynich.json)

flow configuration. This flow reads the RomLex lexicon and the specified lines

of the Voynich transcription and produces an HTML file containing a report on

the possible phonological matches.



### Status



Current results are inconclusive. Possible matches for words meaning "sun",

"moon", "house", and "sky" appear on the first page of the Voynich manuscript,

which are suggestive of references to astrological content, but much more work

needs to be done.



You may see the results of a recent test run of the software for the Voynich Manuscript

[here](http://chalcolith.github.io/enochian/index.html).



### Roadmap



The RomLex lexicon has fewer than 30,000 entries, many of which are duplicates,

due to the lexicon containing data from multiple Romani dialects. This means it

does not provide very conclusive results on its own.



The Shabda-Sagara dictionary also has fewer than 30,000 entries.



## General Functionality



At the most general level, the Enochian library provides a system for

configuring and running "flows" of arbitrary data transformations. This is

implemented by the

[Flow](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/source/Enochian/Flow/Flow.cs)

class, which contains a

[FlowContainer](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/source/Enochian/Flow/FlowContainer.cs)

which can have a number of

[FlowStep](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/source/Enochian/Flow/FlowStep.cs)

objects (which can themselves be containers).



When you iterate over the enumerable returned by `FlowStep.GetOutputs()`, each

step will grab an output from its previous sibling and call its `Process()`

method on it, returning the resulting output. If you implement only

`FlowStep.Process()`, or if you implement `FlowStep.GetOutputs()` using `yield

return`, the flow process will be asynchronous; it will only process as many

items as are needed to return one output.



## Linguistic Resources



In order to do phonological analysis, the Enochian library provides a way to

specify a phonological feature set (see

[features.json](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/resources/encodings/features.json)

for an example using a pretty standard set of phonological features). The

[FeatureSet](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/source/Enochian/Text/FeatureSet.cs)

class is used to load and use these feature sets.



You can also define text "encodings". These take input strings in Unicode and

produce sequences of vectors in the multi-dimensional space defined by the

phonological feature set. A single phonological segment consists of an

`N`-dimensional vector, where `N` is the number of features in your feature set.

If a particular feature has a `+` value for that segment, its corresponding

vector element will be `1`; if it has a `-` value, its vector element will be

`-`. If the feature is unspecified, its vector element will be `0`.



## Lexicons



The systems includes several lexicons:



### CMU Pronouncing Dictionary



This is used for testing the underlying assumption behind the project, that we

can find slightly dissimilar phonological sequences in a lexicon by means of

dynamic time warping. The

[english_test.json](https://github.com/chalcolith/enochian/blob/master/samples/english_test.json)

contains a sample flow that compares a defective encoding of English text with

the CMU dictionary to produce matches for English words. Running this flow

demonstrates that the process is capable of finding many such valid matches.



### RomLex



This is a dictionary of words in various Romani dialects. The database is only

available via the web, so there is a project `RomlexScraper` that scrapes the

web interface to assemble a complete version of the lexicon.



### Shabda-Sagara



This is a 19th-century dictionary of classical Sanskrit.