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

[Emma May Smith]

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.

Thank you so much for this. I agree that the effect is not as strong as for the Voynich text, but the pattern is similar. It's clear that the topic and type of text can influence the similarity of nearby words.