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

[MarcoP]

Thanks to lurker for looking into the code! I guess that these issues with formatting tags can be fixed, but likely others have already developed and shared a more effective cleaning software?

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. 

Hi Luke,
thank you very much for your kind reply! It's great to have you on the forum

Figures from the Historical corpus are closer to what I expected, yet there seem to be a few problems in those files too (see also You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 

The Historical text with the highest reduplication rate appears to be the English Secretum Secretorum by Copland. That file has issues too and I doubt it can be regarded as correct English.
There is a different online transcription (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) that appears to be better.

For instance, this fragment from github:

i have dyscovered to the the thynges that ben to be hyd


is rendered in this other way at umich:

I haue dyscouered to ye the thynges that bē to be hyd


It seems clear that in this case "to ye" is correct and "to the" is not. I would be curious to see scans of the actual 1528 edition, but I have been unable to find them.

I appreciate that collecting a reliable corpus of reference texts (both historical and modern) is a huge effort. I also believe that the Yale Corpora will be a precious resource for people interested in the language side of Voynich research. Thank again to you and Claire for starting this project and sharing it with everybody!