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

[Luke Lindemann]

Hello Marco,

You make some very good points! 

I did the calculations that we wrote up in the paper (I think perhaps the Wikipedia corpus has been modified since the article was published, which might explain why your results are slightly different). You are correct that the structure of the Wikipedia articles may inflate the reduplication rate. The tool I used to extract Wikipedia articles does not distinguish title from content text. Also, some Wikipedia versions, especially for minority languages with very few speakers, have a very short average article length and more formulaic writing, which also inflates the reduplication rate. I'm hoping to look closer at the reduplication rates in the Wikipedia Corpus at some point to separate out reduplication that is a result of article structure and look at the different rates of grammatical reduplication in separate languages. 

In the Historical text corpus, the rate ranges from 0-0.16%. So from that perspective Voynich is a clear outlier, and we haven't yet found any historical texts with reduplication rates as high as Voynich. So it's definitely something we're interested in looking into. 

Best,

Luke