Mapping between Currier A and B

[MarcoP]

Thanks everybody! Enough ideas have been mentioned to keep me busy for months

Another point I had been wondering about is whether the B language could be seen as A language with additional words. The fact that B-language pages tend to have much more text than A-language pages could be just an effect of this 'adding words'.  
This was suggested (probably in quite a cryptic manner) by the last bullet above 'Suggestions for further study' on this page .

Hi Rene,
the fact that Currier B adds new word types to Currier A is certainly central to the whole phenomenon. I don't think that it can explain everything, since there are fluctuations in the frequencies of words that appear everywhere that must have another explanation.
For instance the occurrences of chol/cheey vary from 192/15=12.8 in Herbal_A to 12/36=0.3 in Bio. The frequency of chol in Herbal_A is 2.5%: comparable with the frequency of the most frequent word in English. Even if tokens belonging to the new B-types are frequent, I don't think they are enough to explain how a word drops from 2.5% to 0.2%.

An alternative to the verbose cipher would be a number theory. If the Voynich MS words are like a numbering or enumeration system, a similar progression could be expected. Just compare it with Roman numerals. D only starts appearing after 500 words and M only after 1000. 

In such a case, there is no mapping, but there is a 'generating algorithm' that explains the dialects.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you proposed is (together with Timm & Schinner) one of the very rare solid explanations for quasi-reduplication. But (as pointed out by Torsten) one does not expect new function words to appear after several thousands of words. Can 'chedy' be something like MI (1001)? With a progressive numeric system, MI would correspond to a word (or character, syllable, anything) that never appears in the first several pages of the text: certainly not a frequent item. The frequency of 'chedy' in Bio is close to that of the English conjunction 'and' or the article 'the', or an averagely frequent character like 'm': these items are everywhere, they do not appear after several pages. A similar argument applies to other frequent B-words.

Here I compare the top 30 most frequent words in different sections of the VMS and Latin texts, spanning different subjects and a long time period. In Latin, there is a considerable intersection between the most frequent words (though there also are considerable differences).

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

   

I only see these two options:

1. 'chedy' and other frequent B-words are meaningless (i.e. Currier B is Currier A + meaningless stuff, where CurrierA can be meaningless stuff in its turn);
   
2. 'chedy' represents something (a character, a syllable, a word, part of the encoding of one of these, etc.) that is represented differently in Currier A: some kind of (likely unrecoverable) mapping must exist.
   

Of course, I would be interested in different suggestions.