(22-08-2025, 07:53 AM)quimqu wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The p-value is the probability of obtaining a chi-square statistic at least as extreme as the observed one, assuming the null hypothesis is true.
A low p-value (e.g., < 0.05) means we reject the null hypothesis, suggesting that the distribution of topics depends on the language or scribal hand.
A high p-value means we cannot reject the null, suggesting no evidence of dependence.
In both cases, we have a very low p-value (lowest when we analyze the topics vs. hands), rejecting the null hipotesis that topics are independent of.language/hand.
This is also my understanding of p-values, but I'm bugged by the vanishingly small values you report, which look very unusual to me as p-values (amounting to rock-solid certainties as ever there was one).
I also agree with ofshdk (and with your following answer): 'languages' and 'topics' are defined in the same way, so it's not surprising to find them correlated, while the correlation with the scribes is more interesting (*). But scribes too correlate with the sections of the manuscript, ie. scribe 3 is mostly the Stars section, scribe 4 is Zodiac/Astronomy, scribe 1 mostly Botanical and Recipes, scribe 2 Botanical and Balneological. And there are big 'linguistical' differences between all of these sections (and thus between scribes). There are big differences even within the same scribe, ie. 'qokain' is the 5th most frequent word in Balneological, scribe 2, but it only appears 6 times in the Botanical section of scribe 2. I actually find it plausible that each section+scribe piece in which the VMS can be divided can be seen as having being written in a different 'language'.
(*) but this does not remove my doubts about the p-values, they're really too small.