(03-08-2025, 10:20 AM)GreyCat Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's really interesting - brings up those ideas of herbal astrology like in Culpepper.

(04-08-2025, 03:17 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nicholas Culpeper (18 October 1616 – 10 January 1654) was an English botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer.
His book "The English Physitian,1652",  ( later  "Complete Herbal, 1653" ) is a source of pharmaceutical and herbal lore of the time.

(04-08-2025, 09:20 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-08-2025, 03:17 PM)RobGea Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nicholas Culpeper (18 October 1616 – 10 January 1654) was an English botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer.
His book "The English Physitian,1652",  ( later  "Complete Herbal, 1653" ) is a source of pharmaceutical and herbal lore of the time.

Here is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., that should be better suited to statistical analysis than the raw Project Gutemberg text.

• This reads like preface / general instructions: reasoning about herbs, general use, “ways” of preparation, timing, keeping herbs.
  
• These could be Prologue or introductory notes about how and why to use herbs.
  

• This is remedies: describes health benefits (helpeth, good for pains) and preparations (water, wine, decoction, applied).
  
• It should be the “Virtues” section where the medicinal value of each herb is explained.
  

• This is the “Place” section: where the plant is found or grown (wild, fields, gardens, land).
  
• It also includes words like known, description, well which might introduce local familiarity (“well known in every garden”).
  

• This is a description of the plant’s physical characteristics: leaves, seeds, flowers, roots, color.
  
• Matches the “Description” section of each entry.
  

• This is the “Virtues” section: medicinal benefits of the plant, how it helps ailments, and how it’s prepared (water, wine, decoction, juyce).
  
• Almost identical to what we saw for NMF Topic 1 earlier.
  

• This is the “Description” section: form, size, and color of leaves, flowers, roots, and other parts.
  
• A direct match to the physical description part of each herb entry.
  

• This is the “Place” section: where the herb grows (gardens, fields, wild places, woods).
  
• Tells you where to find or cultivate the plant.
  

• Topic 3: flower, july, ripe, seed, august, june — summer flowering/fruiting
  
• Topic 4: flowreth, ripe, july, seed, june, august — flowering + seed production
  
• Topic 5: flowreth, july, june, august, beginning, months — start and duration of flowering
  
• Topic 7: seedeth, flowreth, august, july, june — seed maturation
  

• These are introductory phrases like “This herb is well known, its description is as follows…” or general commentary.
  
• This fits the opening lines of an entry before moving to the detailed description.
  

• This is clearly the Description section (appearance of the plant).
  
• It talks about physical attributes: size, leaf shape, flower color, roots.
  
• Voynich parallel: The text that would accompany the plant drawings.
  

• Topic 1: july, flowreth, june, august, ripe, seed — flowering/fruiting schedule, mainly summer months.
  
• Topic 5: flower, summer, seed, ripe, end, august, may, april, winter — seasonal cycle with a broader time span (spring → summer → harvest).
  

• This is the Place section.
  
• Lists locations where the plant grows (gardens, wild places, meadows, hedgerows, waste ground).
  

• This is the Virtues section.
  
• Discusses medicinal benefits (help for ulcers, wounds, pains) and preparation methods (wine, decoction, boyled, drunk).
  

• This looks like introductory sentences that precede the Description section.
  
• Phrases like “This herb is well known… the description followeth…”
  
• It’s almost the template line that starts many herb entries.
  

(06-08-2025, 01:03 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Intersting!

But it seems that, with all methods, the "topics" are based on the words that are most common overall, which, not coincidentally, are those with least information.  The really interesting topics would be about the conditions that the plants are supposed to treat.

And another unfortunate thing is that the plants in the herbal section are arranged alphabetically, rather than by similarity of purpose.  Thus any topic will be uniformly scattered through the whole herbal section, rather than lumped in interesting ways...

• Created a list of paragraphs (paragraphs starting with ¡ and ending with ., but also the "lists" of words like in the cosmological roses, ara taken as paragraphs.
  
• Removed the most frequent used words, assuming that they are common words (who knows?). Words removed are: ['aiin', 'ar', 'chedy', 'chey', 'chol', 'daiin', 'dar', 'dy', 'ol', 'or', 'qokeey', 's', 'shedy', 'shey', 'y']
  
• Removed the single word paragraphs.
  
• Ran LDA, BERTopic and NMF models.
  

Please don’t dismiss or demonize my work simply because I consulted ChatGPT for ideas.

• LDA topics are spread fairly evenly across sections; no single topic is strongly concentrated in one section.
  
• Topic 2 stands out:
  • Biological has a very high proportion (0.52)
    
  • That suggests some vocabulary in Topic 2 is unique to that section (possibly labels, patterns, or specialized words).
    
• Botanical is broadly distributed across many topics, which is expected given it’s the largest section.
  
• Astronomical and Cosmological are not dominated by a single topic — they are mixed.
  

• Large share of paragraphs labeled -1 (outliers/no clear topic) especially in Cosmological (0.46), Pharmacological (0.50), Recipes (0.57).
  → Suggests these sections have less internally consistent clusters or use more varied vocabulary.
  
• Topic 0 is Botanical-heavy (0.59).
  
• Topic 2 is Biological-heavy (0.23).
  
• Overall: BERTopic seems to be splitting Botanical and Biological into distinct clusters, but struggles to model Cosmological/Recipes.
  

• Much stronger specialization than LDA:
  • Topic 1 is almost entirely Botanical (0.65).
    
  • Topic 3 is largely Biological (0.46).
    
  • Topic 2 is Cosmological-heavy (0.67).
    
  • Topic 5 is Pharmacological-heavy (0.65).
    
• This is a clear separation:
  NMF aligns topics with manuscript sections much more than LDA or BERTopic.
  

• Top words dominated by common Voynich stems: qokeedy, qokedy, chor, otedy, dal, dain...
  
• These are global frequent tokens, which is why LDA distributes topics evenly across sections.
  
• Topics 0–8 look more like statistical clusters of frequent syllable-like units than semantic groups.
  
• Hypothesis: LDA in Voynich case mostly groups by script/word-form patterns (maybe scribal habits, line positions, gallows usage) rather than semantic categories.
  

• Topics 0–8 clearly group orthographically similar word families:
  • Topic 0: chor, chy, sho, cthy...
    
  • Topic 1: qokaiin, qokain, okaiin...
    
  • Topic 3: otoldy, okol, okolo...
    
  • Topic 5: qokchedy, qopchedy...
    
• This is strong evidence BERTopic clusters by word-form morphology — essentially “roots” or repeating glyph patterns.
  
• These clusters sometimes align with sections (Topic 0 heavily Botanical, etc.).
  

• The clearest segmentation:
  • Topic 1: chor, chy, cthy, shol
    → matches clusters in Herbal/plant section (Botanical).
    
  • Topic 2: okaiin, okar, qokaiin...
    → occurs in sections with lots of aiin endings (Cosmological + Recipes).
    
  • Topic 3: qokain, qokal, qol
    → concentrated in Biological section.
    
  • Topic 5: cheol, okeol, sheol
    → concentrated in Pharmacological.
    
• Hypothesis: NMF is isolating morphological families tied to certain sections — possibly reflecting differences in vocabulary or “currier hands”.
  

• Alphabetical arrangement in Culpeper caused topics to scatter across the section;
  Voynich doesn’t have alphabetical ordering so topic clustering should reflect functional segmentation.
  We see some of that in NMF.
  
• LDA here is limited — its topics align weakly with sections, suggesting it mainly captures high-frequency tokens.
  
• BERTopic finds morphological families but leaves many outliers (-1) — possibly because Voynich word distribution is flatter than typical text corpora.
  
• NMF shows the strongest correspondence between topics and sections, suggesting:
  • Different sections use distinct “lexical sets” (whether actual lexicon or scribal variants).
    
  • Voynich sections may have semi-autonomous vocabularies.
    

1. Different scribes or functional registers
   • The alignment of NMF topics to sections suggests either different scribes with different preferred glyph sequences, or different formulaic content by section.
     
2. Section-specific vocabulary
   • Biological vs. Botanical vs. Pharmacological differences may indicate thematic sets of words (real or pseudo-lexical).
     
3. Cosmological as an anomaly
   • Cosmological sections cluster together in NMF (Topic 2) despite being short; could imply repeated formulae or unique word-shapes.
     
4. Recipes section is diffuse
   • BERTopic and LDA both show Recipes as not strongly tied to one topic; perhaps because of greater lexical diversity or mixing of vocabulary sets.
     
5. Pharmacological section is specialized
   • NMF Topic 5 dominance suggests a stable repeated vocabulary unique to this section.