Scribes and languages

[dfs346]

Thoughts on the five scribes of the Voynich manuscript, as identified by Dr Lisa Fagin Davis; and the commonalities and divergences of their vocabularies. 

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The counts and frequencies of the top ten glyphs used by Scribe D1; and the counts and frequencies of the same glyphs as used by Scribes D2 through D5. Counts based on v101 transliteration. RSQ1 denotes correlation with frequencies of Scribe D1. RSQ2 denotes correlation with frequencies of Scribe D2. Author’s analysis.

[Ruby Novacna]

I haven't been able to understand the merits of your calculation of the correlation. Certainly, statisticians will be able to better assess whether this method is well chosen to answer your question.

[dashstofsk]

A lot of research into the language of the Manuscript includes many such statistics. Word frequencies, character frequencies, suffixes, prefixes, character pairs, word lengths, character and word positional frequencies, gallows occurrences, correlations between the languages clusters, character distributions across quire pages, distribution by illustration types. And much more. These have all been tabulated, correlated and statistically analyzed by many academics, sometimes using deep computational algorithms. Comparison with almost every mediaeval language has also been tried. All this analysis has highlighted that there are many anomalies in the text, and seems to have left everyone baffled.

In the absence of any firm conclusion perhaps the time has come to drop the hypothesis that the text is translatable.

My own efforts at understanding the language ( 100's of hours at my computer writing code to generate and analyze statistics ) has lead me believe that the difference in the language clusters can be easily explained. I mentioned it earlier in another post.

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My hypothesis is that there was never any standard in how to write the Manuscript and that the spelling and syntax changed with time. Also if indeed there were several authors then each might have favoured a different spelling.