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+--- Thread: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. (/thread-5373.html)
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RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - Dunsel - 18-02-2026
(17-02-2026, 01:46 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In a work of fiction this can easily happen if a new character is introduced with a very peculiar foreign sounding name. For example, the below chart shows the number of times "ka" appears in Winnie the Pooh. The first match near the beginning is the chapter index, then there is nothing for half of the book until Roo's mom shows up. But this can happen in non-fiction too, say a history book that doesn't talk about Xerxes until the relevant part of the history is discussed.
And you sir, are exactly why I came to ninja with this. You made me look at something I completely ignored. Thank you!
Now, to address your argument. You are absolutely correct. Adding any proper name with unique bigrams into half a book would produce the same exact results as ed, provided it were used often enough to override other bigrams by count. It definitely would. But, ed is just a bit different.
There are 6 words in the 0ed section that contain ed. And since they only appear once in the entire book, you could easily assume they are proper names. On the other side of that book, ed is in 669 unique words. Of those, 438 are words that only appear once. 231 of those words, keep reappearing. There is a long tail, so many of those words are not used frequently. But others, become core to the vocabulary.
Comparison of unique words and hapax using the bigram ed in the 0ed and ed+ pages.
Frequency count of words in the ed+ pages that contain ed.
Now, if these are true proper names, then chedy is one very busy guy. He appears on almost every single page of the ed+ pages (121 pages) and just over 4 times per page.
So, again, excellent argument but I think I'm going to have to disagree in this case.
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - Dunsel - 18-02-2026
(17-02-2026, 02:59 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(17-02-2026, 01:46 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But this can happen in non-fiction too, say a history book that doesn't talk about Xerxes until the relevant part of the history is discussed.
And 10% to 30% of all "e" are replaced with "xe".
or "er"
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - Dunsel - 18-02-2026
(17-02-2026, 07:54 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm a bit confused. You mention ‘c8’. Is that a word or a symbol for some kind of statistics?
If it's a word, why not just say what it is?
c8 is how the the bigram looks in Voynich. It's also the letters used in earlier transcriptions to represent the Voynich characters ed. A bigram is any 2 letter combination. For example, in combination co and om are the two bigrams that start the word.
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - nablator - 18-02-2026
(18-02-2026, 12:43 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That would change the spelling of a large number of words, but many words would not be affected. And the frequency of "ch" would drop, but not to zero. And some words with "c" and/or with "h" would not be affected...
I see what you mean and can relate from personal experience. There are too letters in Serbian, ћ and ч: both sound very similar to "tch" to me. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
If someone pointed out to me in the middle of attempting to write phonetically a Serbian text that they are different then I would maybe start writing some of them as "che" instead of "ch" which would transform some "chd" to "ched". However this is an hypothetical and unlikely scenario that happened maybe once in a million manuscripts.
One partial transition does not explain everything, the problem is not just "ed", there are many other unexplained statistical gaps and drifts. Maybe many "chol" were replaced by "qol" in language B. Maybe the scribe was suddenly deaf in Q13 to the sound that "eod" makes. Maybe...
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - Jorge_Stolfi - 18-02-2026
(18-02-2026, 11:50 AM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One partial transition does not explain everything, the problem is not just "ed", there are many other unexplained statistical gaps and drifts. Maybe many "chol" were replaced by "qol" in language B. Maybe the scribe was suddenly deaf in Q13 to the sound that "eod" makes. Maybe...
But you saw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I re-posted yesterday, right? Would that be one of the "unexplained" things that need explaining?
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - nablator - 18-02-2026
(18-02-2026, 01:54 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But you saw You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I re-posted yesterday, right? Would that be one of the "unexplained" things that need explaining?
Yes I saw them and liked your first post.
With enough replacements you can transform the distribution of anything into anything and claim that Herbal-A and Herbal-B are not really different languages, but it doesn't prove anything and it doesn't explain why so many transformation are needed and why a gradual change in some spelling/encoding parameters/settings happened throughout the manuscript.
I would agree that they are not "really different" in a hand-waving way, not because these statistics can be made similar by hammering them until they comply, but because the two "languages" have obviously a lot in common and the drift of vocabulary is gradual, continuous, resulting in the V-shaped PCA plot of pages: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was. - Jorge_Stolfi - 18-02-2026
(18-02-2026, 02:58 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With enough replacements you can transform the distribution of anything into anything and claim that Herbal-A and Herbal-B are not really different languages, but it doesn't prove anything and it doesn't explain why so many transformation are needed
That is not true. My description is way more complicated than it should be, but the transformation is merely mapping all gallows to f, all "dealers" d l r s to r, and deleting all other glyphs.
There is no reason to expect that this transformation would make the word frequencies of two different languages coincide.
In particular, the second plot suggests that the "translation" of language A to language B may replace some gallows by other gallows, but cannot create or delete them. And it cannot delete or create any dealers, nor double or collapse them, nor move dealers from one side of a gallows to the other side.
Okay, all these things could happen, but they would have to be balanced. If some dealers move from before the gallows to after the gallows, an equal number (counting tokens nor words) would have to move in the other direction.
Said another way, if you divide the lexicon into subsets that have the same "root", the plot suggests that the translation from A to B shuffles the words within each subset, but not between subsets.
All the best, --stolfi