An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[DonaldFisk]

Clustering is very much a black art.    There are no clear breaks between contiguous clusters, and their differences are small, e.g. for blue and black herbal.   I could have drawn the clusters differently, e.g. subdivided them or moved their boundaries slightly.  Also, if there's randomness, you're going to get some overlap.   What it might help elucidate, is the order in which the text was written.

There are places in the text where word frequencies do change abruptly between non-contiguous clusters, e.g. f26r, from green to red.

Similar words co-occur because they're frequent within certain pages clusters, e.g. the red herbal (Currier B) pages have a high frequency of words ending in edy.

This is exactly my point. The parameters used for clustering are subjective. Other clusterings are also possible. There are notable differences between two clusters. This means another interesting clustering would be to use a cluster for each quire or for each page of the VM. This way you would get smaller differences for two contiguous clusters.  If I understand you right you use one state transition table to simulate each cluster. This means as more transition tables you use as more detailed is your simulation.

This would be no problem if you would argue that you use transition tables to simulate your results for the VMS. But since you claim that the text of the VMS was generated using your transition tables I see two problems. 

The first problem is that you explain the differences within a cluster away as random. This is problematic since the details you see only depend on the number of clusters you use.

The second problem is that you use different transition tables for each cluster segment. As far as I see you didn't give an explanation for the changes between two transition tables.  One explanation I see is that for the VMS a unknown text generation method was used and that the output for this unknown method changes over time. But this would mean that your state transition tables are only a way to simulate some of the output of this unknown text generation method. This would mean that your state transition tables can be very useful to learn something about this text generation method. But this would mean that they are only a simulation not the unknown method itself.

I now actually think we're close to agreeing on this.   The clusters are to some extent arbitrary.   The PCA plots for the pages on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are not arbitrary (which is why Sarah Goslee's plot is nearly identical to mine except for its orientation, which doesn't matter), and indicate how similar any two pages are.   This can then be compared with the bindings and the handwriting.

Also, if there's a method which is mathematically equivalent to the state machine I propose, but doesn't explicitly use it, I'm happy with that.   The important thing is that the state transition table is a grammar for the words, and the ones on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. model almost 90% of the words, and I'm sure that can be improved upon.

In summary, I think my analysis stands up, and adds to what was already known, even if you disagree with my conclusions.