VMs: statistics of the german language 14th/15th century

["Christoph M. Wintersteiger" <christoph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

okay, here goes: I have some numbers and charts for your entertainment and 
research. I took the 40 texts available at 
http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/frnhd/, which are dated in one of 
these eras: (1350 - 1400, 1450 - 1500, 1550 - 1600 und 1650 - 1700). They 
all are stories of some kind, some with a heavy theological background; 
most of the stories seem to be 'true stories'. There are three works that 
seem to have a medical background (one is even about surgery). None of them 
have a technical background like from astronomy, alchemy or mathematics. 
Those texts have been pressed into XML format by the people of the "Bonner 
Frühneuhochdeutschkorpus". Those texts are annotated with word classes and 
everything one could possibly dream of. I've ran these texts through a 
quickhack XSLT transform, and then collected the tables of data onto one 
webpage that can be seen at http://www.winterstiger.at/christoph/voynich/
Then i transferred the data for the word length counts (excluding counts 
for words longer than 12 letters, but those numbers are included in the 
tables if someone has a need for them.) into SPSS and ran a few statistics 
over them and created some charts as well. Those who are familiar with 
statistical terms, and those who'd like to see the charts can have a look 
at the material at http://www.winterstiger.at/christoph/voynich/OUTPUT.HTM

As for my first look at that data, i can't really see any obvious 
resemblance to the language used in the VMS, although I'd like the 
interpretation of the numbers up to someone who's more familiar with the 
VMS and probably language theory, too.

If someone would like to have some additional statistics run over the data, 
please don't refrain from asking me, I'd be glad to do that. If someone 
wants the source files (my xslt transfrom and the spss tables), those can 
as well be transferred to you by the magic of email.

I hope I could bring something interesting there to help you develop 
further ideas or to strengthen the ones you already had :)

Greetings,
Christoph

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