Re: VMs: A very important discovery!!

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Jose Rodriguez <josers_1982@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Well, as I say in the title of this post I believe
> that I have found an important discovery, which can
> indicate that Voynich MS isn't a hoax. Yes, you are
> hearing well, I believe that this discovery can
> demonstrate it. (it will be necessary that more
> people confirm it). 

It's certainly a nice plot that shows that something
unusual is going on. I wouldn't say that it is
evidence against a hoax, nor that it confirms
hypotheses made by Steve Ekwall or Marianne
Ridderstad. It is however worth looking into deeper.

The effect can be partly understood by those who
are familiar with some of the peculiarities of the
VMs text. 
If a text follows Zipf's law, then the percentage 
of different words will decrease as the text gets
longer. This effect is turned around if, for some
reason, suddenly new words start to appear
too frequently. This could be a change of language,
but also a change of vocabulary in the same 
language (e.g. subject matter) or a change of the
code if it is a ciphertext. We can use the word
vocabulary for all options.

Since you sorted all lines alphabetically, we
get a strange snapshot of the 'development'
of the vocabulary. Now it is known that the lines
starting with the three gallows letters you indicate
are usually the first lines of paragraphs. And it is
also known that these are the lines where almost
all words containing an Eva-p or Eva-f occur.
Thus, in this case the sudden appearance of
too many new words is explained.

Except, that one would expect it only for the
first case (Eva-f). Instead, it also happens
again for the other gallows, meaning that there
are still different words in these lines. That 
could mean several things. The least interesting
one is if there are simply only very few lines
starting with f or p. But there could be more
interesting reasons too.

It is definitely worth taking a closer look at
which are these 'new' words.
Some important questions are:
1) Which source text did you use? The whole MS
   including all labels and circular texts etc, or
   a subset?
2) Can you find back the lines starting with
   f, k and p where the increase is observed ?
(As indicated above, these are expected to
be paragraph start lines).

I would also wonder whether the corpus of
words (I should say: tokens) that include an
Eva-f or Eva-p actually follow Zipf's law or not.
(I would exclude in this corpus the big paragraph
start markers).

Best wishes, Rene


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list