[split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript

[Torsten]

The interesting part is not that the main text follows Zipf law, but that the main text does while the labels do not.

This means that not the same process was followed for generating or writing the main text and for the labels.

The words used as labels are not alien to the VMS. The majority of words used as labels also occur within the main text. See for instance the three instances of [otalar]. It is used two times in the main text and it used once as label. But if the difference is in the statics there is also the possibility that the same generating process behave differently for labels. 

From the text we know that line initial words and line final words behave differently from the text. We also know that the first line in a paragraph contains more gallow glyphs. Therefore I didn't found it surprising that the VMS behave differently for words used in a different context. This is especially true on pages where the labels are arranged in circular form.

It is no problem to find an explanation for the different statistics for labels. If the text contains language it is no surprise if names used as labels behave differently then the normal text. If the text was generated by using a cipher a thinkable explanation is that the labels are meaningless whereas the main text encodes information. 


If the text was generated by the auto-copying method a possible explanation is that the words written in circular form were harder to copy. Therefore the scribe probably used these groups less frequently as a source for the generation of new text [Timm 2014 p. 17]. 

It is possible to backup this argumentation with some observations. An interesting observation is that some identical labels are used in the astronomical and in the herbal section. These labels are [okary], [oky], [otalam], [okeoly], [otaly], [otoky], [otaldy], [otal], [otal], [ykeody], [okeody], [okeos], [otory], [okody] and [oran]. One would at least not expect several stars or star constellations to be named after plants or parts of plants. Moreover, some similarly spelled labels occur together in both sections [Timm 2014 p. 9].

It is interesting that on some pages it seems that some consecutive labels are generated by replacing glyphs with similarly shaped ones. Page <f70v2> provides an example of this:
<f70v2.S1.1> otaral
<f70v2.S1.2> otalar
<f70v2.S1.3> otalam
<f70v2.S1.4> dolaram
<f70v2.S1.5> okaram
<f70v2.S1.8> okaldal
There is another interesting observation for page <f70v2>. In line <f70v2.R3.1> a word [oteotey] and a word [oteoteotsho] occur. The repetition of [ote] within both words is probably not a coincidence since the first word occurs only four times and the second word is unique. Furthermore, on page <f71r> a similar duplication pattern occurred using [oke]. In this case, the unique words [okeoky] and [okeokeokeody] were used. These observations raise the question as to whether the generating mechanism for labels is less complex and therefore easier to determine [Timm 2014 p. 9].