Thank you, Emma and Rene!
Your questions and observations make me even more eager to read Bowern's paper: I am sure it will add more ideas for further research.
The difference between You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (same bifolio) pointed out by Emma looks like another interesting anomaly. Herbal pages do not have that much text and, as Rene says, the results are not reliable. But voynichese.com shows that f.93v and and f.96v look dramatically different, for instance with respect to 'or' and cho/sho. On the other hand, the two "r" sides seem to be comparable.
It could be that these fluctuations are random noise and the position of f93 is accidental: the fact that f87, 90 and 97 are close to the Pharma group seems less likely to be accidental.
Unreliable data due to short text could be the reason why Botanical pages (both A and B) appear to be more spread than pages from more text-intensive sections (e.g. Baleno/Q13 and Stars/Q20). One could consider experimenting with bigram counts for whole bifolios, instead of pages. Another possibility is following the steps of Julian Bunn and process character statistics, instead of bigrams. Both options would double the number of samples from each page. I might play around with these options in the future.
Coming back to the PCA graph, in the Balneo/Q13 section, f80 seems to stand out: this appears to be due to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. being half as frequent as in the other pages of the section (f79, in the same bifolio, also has a lower rate). In this case, the quantity of text is considerable.
I didn't notice that pages by Scribe 5 concentrate on the right-side of the B-cloud in the PCA plot: thanks to Rene for pointing that out! Unluckily, I cannot understand why it is so: PCA results are not easy to interpret. The individual values for the pages are rather different, for instance f41 appears to be closer to the Balneo section than to the other pages by Scribe 5. Could their similar position on the right border of the cloud suggest that their features share some prominent geometrical property (e.g. constant ratios across some couples of features?).
I agree that both Scribes and illustrations appear to be correlated with changes in dialects. It will be interesting to see where the new path opened by Lisa leads...
Your questions and observations make me even more eager to read Bowern's paper: I am sure it will add more ideas for further research.
The difference between You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (same bifolio) pointed out by Emma looks like another interesting anomaly. Herbal pages do not have that much text and, as Rene says, the results are not reliable. But voynichese.com shows that f.93v and and f.96v look dramatically different, for instance with respect to 'or' and cho/sho. On the other hand, the two "r" sides seem to be comparable.
It could be that these fluctuations are random noise and the position of f93 is accidental: the fact that f87, 90 and 97 are close to the Pharma group seems less likely to be accidental.
Unreliable data due to short text could be the reason why Botanical pages (both A and B) appear to be more spread than pages from more text-intensive sections (e.g. Baleno/Q13 and Stars/Q20). One could consider experimenting with bigram counts for whole bifolios, instead of pages. Another possibility is following the steps of Julian Bunn and process character statistics, instead of bigrams. Both options would double the number of samples from each page. I might play around with these options in the future.
Coming back to the PCA graph, in the Balneo/Q13 section, f80 seems to stand out: this appears to be due to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. being half as frequent as in the other pages of the section (f79, in the same bifolio, also has a lower rate). In this case, the quantity of text is considerable.
I didn't notice that pages by Scribe 5 concentrate on the right-side of the B-cloud in the PCA plot: thanks to Rene for pointing that out! Unluckily, I cannot understand why it is so: PCA results are not easy to interpret. The individual values for the pages are rather different, for instance f41 appears to be closer to the Balneo section than to the other pages by Scribe 5. Could their similar position on the right border of the cloud suggest that their features share some prominent geometrical property (e.g. constant ratios across some couples of features?).
I agree that both Scribes and illustrations appear to be correlated with changes in dialects. It will be interesting to see where the new path opened by Lisa leads...