Re: VMs: Voynich analysis

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff Haley wrote:

> This way any topic specific word forms could be anchored to the section
> topic. If all word forms in the dictionaries are evenly distributed across
> topic sections then the probability is high that the content is a hoax and
> is meaningless. Certain word forms such as the definite and indefinite
> articles would be evenly distributed across topics whereas nouns such as
> petal, leaf or stem would appear more regularly in the herbal section.

It seems to me that comparing different parts of the VMS should be a powerful
technique.

I have tried a couple of small tests along those lines in the past, with no
particularly promising results so far:

1.    Looking for words which appear more than once on a page but never on any
other pages, with the idea that they might represent plant names, i.e.  "   The
LILY is a marsh plant ......  the LILY blooms ...... etc.    "

    However, I only found 28 such words, of which three occurred three times
and the rest only twice - also, several of them were quite short, probably too
short for a proper name.

2.    Comparing statistics on A- and B-hand pages after deleting a few
characters, to try to find a small set of letters which would cause the two
sets of statistics to agree more closely. (The theory I had was that there
might have been two scribes, each adding nulls to a text according to his own
fancy - that is, using the same null characters but with idoisyncratic
frequency and choice of null.) There were a few sets of characters that made
the two hands more similar, but I never figured out a systematic way to pursue
this.

Bruce

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