Mapping between Currier A and B

[MarcoP]

Recently You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. confirmed the presence of different hands in the VMS and pointed out that some correlation exists between hands and "dialects" i.e. different sub-groups of the two larger classes known as Currier A and B.

Also, the joint efforts of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. showed that variation in the distribution of the two benches ch sh appears to be due to the differences between the various image-identified sections, rather than to differences between single pages.

These recent findings suggest that it might be better to try and match single dialects, rather than the bulk of Currier A and Currier B. Until we have a complete classification of the ms pages according to the different hands, I had a look at differences based on the image-defined sections. I used paragraph text from the Zandbergen-Landini EVA transliteration, ignoring dubious spaces. The difference measure is the same I used in the experiments described above: Bhattacharyya distance between digraph histograms (including the space between words and line-break as two distinct characters).

This is what I found (as always, I may have made errors in the process):

__      HerbalA Pharma  AstroCZ HerbalB StarsQ20  BioQ13
chars     45505   13769   10909   20197   67078   40333
 
HerbalA       0  0.0493  0.0646  0.0790  0.0955  0.1308
Pharma   0.0493       0  0.0585  0.0675  0.0664  0.0936
AstroCZ  0.0646  0.0585       0  0.0247  0.0264  0.0626
HerbalB  0.0790  0.0675  0.0247       0  0.0277  0.0481
StarsQ20 0.0955  0.0664  0.0264  0.0277       0  0.0317
BioQ13   0.1308  0.0936  0.0626  0.0481  0.0317       0
 
average  0.0699  0.0559  0.0395  0.0412  0.0413  0.0611

AstroCZ groups together all pages classified as Astrological, Cosmological or Zodiac (but I think that the Zodiac actually does not contribute any paragraph). The sections are sorted according to what Rene discusses at the end of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., in which he showed the significant correlation between dialects and subject of the illustrations.

The table above does not add much to what can be deduced from Rene's graphs: the HerbalA and BioQ13 sections are at the opposite extremes of the range. The difference between the two (0.13) is as large as the difference between Latin (Virgil's Aeneid) and Italian (Dante's Commedia) - well distinct but related languages.
On the other hand, the three intermediate sections AstroCZ, HerbalB, StarsQ20 are all similar, with differences in the 0.025-0.028 range, just slightly more than the difference between Virigil's classical Latin poetry and Mattioli's early-modern Latin prose (0.022).

Currently, I think that a possible approach to map the whole VMS text to a uniform language could be choosing one of the central sections (e.g. Q20), or maybe the concatenation of the three, as "canonical" and mapping the other sections into that structure. In this way, HerbalA and Q13 would converge towards the canonical language from opposite directions and would meet mid-way, without the need of too many changes in any subset.