Re: VMs: Re: Currier A and B

["Jorge Aveleira" <jorvms@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gabriel wrote:
"Yes, sure, but also notice that the "distance" between the "languages" is
not that great either: http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/zipf.htm
Look for "Distance between languages": "

Hi Gabriel:
Thanks for the link to the results of some of your sound, sophisticated
statistical analysis. The distance between Currier A and B languages seems
enough to my amateur judgement to deserve perhaps more attention than that
fact has received recently. There are so few known hard facts about the
contents of the VMs... I have a personal opinion that the two languages
result from the "different ways of "encoding" the text (different keys or
method in different parts of the manuscript)", one of your alternatives.
Perhaps it even happened as an accident, one encoder repeatedly making a
small mistake...

"The reason for the differences between Emma and Alice is perhaps due to a
different vocabulary? Children-orientated vs. adult vocabularies? Any
suggestions are welcome."
I think that here you already offered the most likely answer. How Alice's
word length compares with fairy tales or something alike, for example Hans
Christian Andersen: http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext99/hcaft10.txt or
Jacob Grimm: http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext01/grimm10.txt

That should not be the case for the shorter vocabulary in VMS, we could be
almost sure about that :-) You may have already checked Stolfi's article on
VMS' word length
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-12-21-word-length-distr/ ?
Stolfi: "These coincidences cry for an explanation. In fact, the word length
distribution matches almost perfectly a binomial distribution for 9
equally-likely coin tosses, shifted by 1 --- which is choose(9,k-1)/(2^9)"

It may be just a terribly attractive coincidence, but we have exactly 9
equally-likely objects containing labels and rings of text arranged in an
impressive composition in f85_86. One of the objects contains a collection
of 10 labels... I would feel really thrilled if you or Stolfi, or you both,
decide to make a few comparative analysis between the groups of labels in
f85_86 and the text of Herbal A, for example.

Thanks for your commentary,
Jorge Aveleira

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