Thank you again, Rene and Anton! Once again, discussing things on the forum has been worth the effort.
These are updated graphs for X Y X Z, where Y and Z are different from X but may be identical (so X Y X Y is included here).
I computed the expected occurrences as described by Anton
p*(1-p)*p*(1-p)
using word frequency as an estimate of 'p'
My idea was comparing with a randomly independent arrangement, so I wouldn't go into anything more complex at the moment.
It turned out that the major distortion I introduced was on the "actual" count, where I removed more aggressively than I realized occurrences of the X X' X kind, where X' is similar to X, or of the X Y X Y' kind. Here I have applied no such filtering, and the VMS figures are very different, closer to what Rene said.
The impact of this is considerably more limited on the other languages.
I have added a blue bar, where I display the occurrences of XYXY (a subset of those counted in the red bar "actual"). As you can see, this pattern does not have a huge impact in any graph. "Word-couple repetition" never occurs in Latin but is present in Dante ("a poco a poco", slowly, "a mille a mille", thousands and thousands).
If I haven't introduced more significant errors, Voynichese seems to have a much more pervasive presence of the alternating pattern than I initially thought. The pattern does not seem to be restricted to dedicated function words as in Mattioli's Latin.
I will look more into this in the future and I hope that others will make independent analyses on the subject.
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___
PS: these are the total occurrences of the pattern in the examined texts. Quire13 is about 1/5 as long as the other texts. The totals are different, but mostly comparable. As the graphs show, a difference is that, in the comparison languages, most occurrences involve the conjunction 'e'/'et'/'and', while in the VMS several words exhibit a preference for this arrangement. This also happens in Mattioli, but here the difference is that "alternating words" in the VMS also occur in other arrangement, while Mattioli's "tum" etc. regularly appear alternating with other words.
These are updated graphs for X Y X Z, where Y and Z are different from X but may be identical (so X Y X Y is included here).
I computed the expected occurrences as described by Anton
p*(1-p)*p*(1-p)
using word frequency as an estimate of 'p'
My idea was comparing with a randomly independent arrangement, so I wouldn't go into anything more complex at the moment.
It turned out that the major distortion I introduced was on the "actual" count, where I removed more aggressively than I realized occurrences of the X X' X kind, where X' is similar to X, or of the X Y X Y' kind. Here I have applied no such filtering, and the VMS figures are very different, closer to what Rene said.
The impact of this is considerably more limited on the other languages.
I have added a blue bar, where I display the occurrences of XYXY (a subset of those counted in the red bar "actual"). As you can see, this pattern does not have a huge impact in any graph. "Word-couple repetition" never occurs in Latin but is present in Dante ("a poco a poco", slowly, "a mille a mille", thousands and thousands).
If I haven't introduced more significant errors, Voynichese seems to have a much more pervasive presence of the alternating pattern than I initially thought. The pattern does not seem to be restricted to dedicated function words as in Mattioli's Latin.
I will look more into this in the future and I hope that others will make independent analyses on the subject.
___
___
PS: these are the total occurrences of the pattern in the examined texts. Quire13 is about 1/5 as long as the other texts. The totals are different, but mostly comparable. As the graphs show, a difference is that, in the comparison languages, most occurrences involve the conjunction 'e'/'et'/'and', while in the VMS several words exhibit a preference for this arrangement. This also happens in Mattioli, but here the difference is that "alternating words" in the VMS also occur in other arrangement, while Mattioli's "tum" etc. regularly appear alternating with other words.
Code:
Dante 153
K.James_Genesis 227
Pliny 109
Mattioli 177
VMS 244
VMS_Quire13 84