Why is there even a Voynich B?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Hi Jorge, I ran NMF topic modeling on the four Dom Casmurro files (DC1–DC4). ... The NMF results show a very strong match between the learned topics and the file sections, with the best performance at K = 3 (AMI = 0.81, p ≈ 0). This means that the model clearly identifies three main linguistic clusters across the corpus. Given the setup, that outcome makes perfect sense: the two Portuguese spellings are grouped togethr, the phonetic respelling is separated apart, and the Spanish text stands apart also as its own distinct group.

Very good!

You can see that a small part of the paragraphs is given a wrong topic, but I assume this can happen due to the proximity of the three languages.

This is something to keep in mind when analyzing the VMS "languages".  Does it mean that they are farther apart than Spanish and Portuguese?

Finally, here you can see the top weighted words per topic that the model has found:

=== Main topic 0 ===
? Dialect (main topic words):
nao, ci, os, la, um, di, mi, nau, con, un, el, do, com, si, en, em, ao, que, las, lhe, los, us, du, para, lhi, pra, olhos, in, as, pero, me, mas, mae, su, au, disse, os olhos, dos, menti, voce

=== Main topic 1 ===
? Dialect (main topic words):
ci, di, nau, de, que, me, us, du, pra, lhi, la, in, nao, si, mais, se, no, au, menti, comu, os, um, eli, nu, el, por, para, min, mai, mas, pur, en, como, joze, padri, do, com, veis, ci nau, tamben

=== Main topic 2 ===
? Dialect (main topic words):
la, el, en, los, las, no, de, lo, pero, su, una, del, de la, le, al, es, sus, en la, con, por, madre, fue, en el, de mi, yo, mi madre, que, ojos, de los, ci, solo, habia, ni, tenia, nao, un, mi, despues, sin, lo que

This is bizarre.  The words "nao" ("não")  and "os" (for instance) should be strictly Portuguese in 1899 or 1999 spellings (DC1 and DC2), "nau" ("nãu") and "ci" strictly from the phonetic spelling (DC3), and "los" and "pero" strictly from Spanish (DC4).  But they appear across those three topics.  Although topic 2 seems to be mostly Spanish, while topics 0 and 1 are mostly a mix of official and phonetic Portuguese words.

The phonetic Portuguese spelling used in DC3 retains the word spaces of the original (which should be almost precisely the same in the 1899 and 1999 spellings); except for the adverbial suffix "-mente", which in the phonetic version has been turned into a separate word "mênti" (justified the stress pattern).   It is possible (just possible) that VMS A and B differ on the splitting of some words, besides other things.

All the best, --jorge