Language A vs B crib?

[julian]

Here's the idea: First we count the frequency of words that appear in a set of folios written in "Language A", and then we count the frequency of words in a set of folios written in "Language B". We then compare the distributions: a reasonable speculation is that the most common words in A are the same plaintext as the most common words in B. 

Here's what you get if you compare the Herbal folios in Language A (1 through 56) with the Recipe folios in Language B (103 through 116):


(The table shows the top ten words in the combined folios, then broken out into the Language A and Language B folios.)

This shows that in Language A the most common word is "8am", whereas in Language B it is "am". (Having said that, the frequencies are quite different.) If you buy the hypothesis that they are ciphers for the same plaintext word, then the glyph "8" is likely a null in Language A. Comparing other frequent words in the same way may reveal insight into how the text is enciphered ... For example, the next most frequent word in A is "1oe" whereas in B it is "1c89": does that mean that "oe" in A converts to the same letters as "c89" in B?

I took this idea and ran with it for a while (in the linked posts from my blog below), but made little headway. I'd be most interested to hear critiques of this approach 

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Julian