Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Torsten]

I think it's best now to turn to Figure 4 (page 8) as a lot of the argument hinges on this. The graph shows that the edit distance between words is lower the nearer the words occur. Words are more similar by up to 0.3 of an edit distance within 30 (Herbal A) or 60 lines (Quire 20), before reaching a stable edit distance beyond those numbers of lines. A comparison with a text in English (Alice in Wonderland) is made.

A better choice than Alice in Wonderland for comparison with Herbal A would be the Latin translation of Dioscorides with Mattioli's commentary (1554). This is book 4, with titles removed to avoid spurious local repetitions of words.

Horizontally: distance in lines (standardized to 60-80 characters), vertically: average edit distance between words of these lines.

The highly thematic text causes some repetitions of words and a significant part of the vocabulary of the Dioscorides text is repeated in the commentary, so some local similarities are not unexpected, but the effect is much less pronounced than in the VMS.

This is an interesting example. Is the text online available? Could you post a link to the analyzed text sample?

Word repetitions are not enough to explain the effect for the VMS. There the effect also occurs because of similar tokens. Even for consecutive tokens the number of times they start with the same initial glyphs or end with the same final glyphs is significant. For a deeper analysis see table 1. "Initial-Initial dependency" and table 3 "Final-Final dependency" in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Vladimir Sazonov: "As it is clear from the tables 1 and 3, the words very often reproduce the same form (the same initial or the same final) in the next word. For example, -aiin or qo- or -dy can repeat many times with good density" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).