RE: VMs: Rene: Stat questions

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello GC,

thanks for your feedback. Currier was not the first
to notice that there are two types of herbal pages.
There are notes in Th. Petersen's hand transcription
of the VMs which clearly indicate that he noticed
the patterns already in the 1930's. 
However, Currier was the first one to 
analyse it in some more detail, to come up with
the concept of two 'languages', which he calls A
and B, and to provide some criteria to distinguish 
between the two. 
I think that you will agree that these criteria
are fuzzy. I copy them from my web site (using 
Eva):

> The main properties of Currier's two languages
> are: 

> - Final dy is very high in Language 'B', almost
    non-existent in Language 'A' 
> - The symbol groups chol and chor are very high
>   in 'A' and often occur repeated; low in 'B' 
> - The symbol groups chain and chaiin rarely occur 
>   in 'B'; medium frequency in 'A' 
> - Initial chot high in 'A'; rare in 'B' 
> - Initial cTh very high in 'A'; very low in 'B' 
> - 'Unattached' finals scattered throughout 
>   language 'B' texts in considerable profusion; 
>   generally much less noticeable in Language 'A'. 

On some of these criteria we can do better now,
but it is still very hard to apply any of these 
to single lines. 

My favourite criterium has become the occurrence
of the character combination Eva-e followed by
Eva-d (Currier C followed by Currier 8). Note that
Frogguy already did some analysis many years before,
based on the distinction of Currier -O8 in 
A-language and Currier -C8 in B-language.
My main problem with the Eva -ed- digraph is
that -eed- is easily confused with -chd- . One
has to rely on the accuracy of the transcription
here.

If you look again at the graphs at the bottom of
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curabcd.html
(the two graphs which are third from the bottom)
you see that there are only a few uncertain pages
in Herbal-A (the red crosses), if one uses this 
criterium.

--- GC <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I have doubts that the [hb] bifolios are out of
> place, since they seem to
> follow a certain pattern.  

They may be in the right place, since the quire
markings are consistent throughout the HA whole
section. However, they could have been written in
a much different order. If the quire markings were
done later, by someone collating the MS, who could
not read it, this objection disappears. I am
not sure if this scenario makes sense though.
On the other hand: why, then, are there also some
HA pages near the end of the MS (in language-B
territory, so to speak).

> [hb] pages have 26.2% of their
> combined words as unique words, occurring only once
> in the herbal section.
> [ha] has almost three times as many words (7,036 vs.
> 2,728), but also has
> 24.5% of its total words as unique words.

I'm not sure if that means too much. The Zipf law
describes this very phenomenon, and it seems to
hold for natural languages in general.

> Even with such a large difference
> in total word occurrences, [ha] shares 50.5% of its
> words with [hb], while
> [hb] shares 54.6% of its total words with [ha]. 

This is a good argument for the theory that the
underlying language is the same.  It is important
to distinguish in these statistics if you count
'different words' or 'all words'. 

> [ha] is not strictly [ha], in my view.  Each quire
> has some big differences,
> but there are more similarities between q1 (quire 1)
> and q3 than with any
> other [ha] quire.  q2 appears to be devoid of many
> of the things that join
> q1 and q3, but q2 has much in common with q6.

I agree with your general statement. The Herbal-A
text is more variable than other sections.
See the size of the area covered by the red crosses
in http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curabcd.html
in the plots in the middle.
Gabriel made a dendrogram based on these distances
at: http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/cl2.htm
There seems to be some kind of 'progression' and
a hint that the herbal-A pages near the end
of the MS are more like pharma language than the
others, but there is a lot of noise on this due
to the small sample (words per page), and maybe
I'm just seeing what I'm hoping to see.

> Looking at quires is important to me at the moment
> because of the inclusion
> of [hb] pages in q4 and beyond.  q4 and q5 have many
> things in common, in
> both [ha] and [hb].  What gets interesting is that
> the [hb] pages inserted
> before q6 often have little in common with the [hb]
> sections of q6 and q7.

I haven't observed this - see the above-mentioned 
figures. I can observe differences between herbal-B
and bio-B, in particular related to word-initial
qo- (labelled ho-) and digraph -ol- (not only
word-ending).

Note that my analyis looked at word structure, not
at specific words. But it is quite interesting,
since the colour of the crosses in 
http://www.voynich.nu/extra/curabcd.html
are based on the illustrations. 
Look at the behaviour of word-initial cho-
(top graph) in the B dialects. Also, the variation
in usage of -ol- is not reflected in that of -or-.

Another neat thing is the fraction of -ed-
in the bio section. There are four slightly
anomalous pages in the middle of the quire. 
This is where there is one bifolio that seems to
be out of place, following the illustration of the 
next inner bifolio. Is it a coincidence?
(I wonder if anyone is reading this :-) For
me it is another sign of 'intelligence' or
rather 'consistency' in the MS which does not
fit with the meaningless hoax theory).

> I need to take this all much deeper - I just
> need to be asking the right question. Any ideas?

Not really, apart from the thoughts I expressed
above (e.g. about the relative importance about
'unique' words). Right now, you are taking things
a step further than I did and I am quite curious
to see your results. 

Having seen all this, one has to come to the
conclusion that there are still lots of pointers 
throughout the MS which have not been followed up.
That's why I'm not convicved that this is an
unsolveable puzzle.

Cheers, Rene



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