Is anyone familiar with studies looking at the question of how stable the set of the N most common words in a text M words in length is (in a given language) as a function of N, M, and differences in topic? Google didn't seem to be turning up studies that speak to that point.
It seems to me that this might prove to be a profitless task. But if you are curious to know something about the most frequent words in the VMS then you might like to note some differences in the language B sections.
The language in quire 13 seems to show less variability than in the rest of the manuscript. There is a high frequency of just a few words. 9 words make up 20% of the total. With
ol coming top and
daiin aiin not in the top 20%. But in the Herbal B2 pages 20% of the total is made up of 12 words, with
ol low in the list and
daiin aiin now being top. Yet this is odd since both sets of pages are in hand 2, supposedly written by the same person, and marked as being language B.
And in quire 20 ( language B, mostly hand 3 ) 20% of the text is made up of 16 words. With
al being a common word that is uncommon in the other two lists.
What does this show? Just that there are several clusters and there appears not to be one standard language B.
Quire 13 top words
Herbal B2 top words
Quire 20 top words