VM TTR values

[MarcoP]

Voynichese distributes its vocabulary as if it were drawn from a bag, at least it does so more than regular texts.

Hi Koen,
I don't know much about statistics either, but normalization is tricky, though necessary here to make things visually comparable.
The fact that Q20 is very close to the average of your corpus of shuffled texts does not mean that it behaves as a shuffled text. The average line is not a shuffled document, but an abstraction. If one compares the actual Q20 with a shuffled Q20, one finds that reduplication is more frequent in the actual file than in the shuffled file, hence MATTR is lower in the actual file than in the shuffled file. As was already mentioned in this thread, Voynichese favours reduplication in comparison to shuffling, while actual texts have less reduplication than their shuffled counterpart.

The high reduplication rate shows that Voynichese words are not distributed as if they were drawn from a bag. Line phenomena are another aspect of Voynichese that is highly predictable in some cases (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and certainly not random. The last-first character combinations that Emma and I discussed in our paper is a third way in which Voynichese word order shows marked deviations from randomness. I am not sure of the effects of second and third point on MATTR, but they are likely to have an impact in some way.

In conclusion, I am not sure that Voynichese is closer to being drawn from a bag than natural languages. What we can tell is that Voynichese words appear to be arranged by rules and preferences that are different from the rules and preferences of the grammar of European languages.