[Article] Topic Modeling in the Voynich Manuscript

[Emma May Smith]

Is it possible that there actually are two dialects being encoded here?  Latin, for instance, seems to have been modified by every language group in Europe.  Doesn't the difference between A and B, for instance, seem to argue for encoding two different original works (or written by different dialect-speaking scribes) in closely related 'dialects'?  And could linguists perhaps derive some clues from the very frequent 89, or eva dy, in B as opposed to A, that seems to be a common ending in one but not the other?  

There are key differences in the text between sections and between scribes. Which would suggest that both the content and the individual are at least partly responsible for the variety in the text. If you listened to an American talk about car maintenance and an English woman talk about healthcare, and you can imagine how different the words would be.

But those two speakers would at least share a core common vocabulary, which remains steady across all English speakers and all topics. As Marco says, that doesn't really happen in the Voynich text. The same words do often appear, but in sometimes vastly different frequencies. And the detail of word structure can vary, as bigram statistics attest.

It's almost as if we can definitely say a) that the whole text used the same script, and b) that the same general structure of words is the same, but nothing beyond that. You could suggest that the Voynich is built from text in different languages but enciphered in the same way.