[Article] The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript (Bowern et al. 2020)

[cbowern]

Thanks to everybody for the interesting comments!
I agree with Emma about the importance of Zipf's law and entropy for Bowern and Lindeman's arguments. The fact that these linguists make extensive reference to quantitative measures is one of the strengths of the paper.  As I said, I hope they will share their corpus so that people can replicate their experiments.

We will definitely share all code and corpus materials, in the next month or so - we are currently finalizing both the corpus paper and two other papers (one on TF/IDF and one on script inference). Unfortunately covid-related closures and online teaching has really slowed this work down.

As far as I recall, when Lisa mentioned Bowern's work to me, this would be about looking for text behaviour that matches different scribal hands. This sounded very interesting, but I don't know if it was abandoned or still in progress.

Hi Koen,
there's a reference to what I guess is another forthcoming paper (not still available, it seems):

Sterneck, Rachel and Claire Bowern. 2020. Topic modeling in the Voynich manuscript. URL
arxiv.org.

We need to do some edits to the paper (mostly to explain in more detail what we did). It should be up soon. We were looking at whether we could disentangle linguistic features that might be represented in different scribal hands versus differences in subject matter (which was a comment above too). I think the answer in brief is that TF/IDF keyword analyses like we did can recover differences between scribes when we also take subject matter (as inferred by the illustrations) into account.