Inside the Voynich Network: graph analysis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Here are the plots with Jorge Stolfi's "Dom Casmurro's"

Great!

The most interesting result is the proximity of the Spanish "head" texts to the Portuguese "tail ones, and vice-versa.  Those are essentially distinct texts, in rather different languages and quite different spellings, technically by distinct authors (Machado in the latter, and Tapía translating Machado in the former).  What they had in common was the higher-level nature and style of the work (grammatical variety, clause length, predominant verbal tenses, etc.), the general topic (which determined proper names and common concepts and actions) and whatever part of the author's style could survive the translation.  

Compared with Lazarillo de Tormes, Dom Casmurro is more uniform and modern in structure. Lazarillo shows greater lexical variety and less repetition, giving it a sparser, more modular network. This can be the difference between current Spanish and older, as the older has a less standardized syntax (16th-century Spanish) and it has a heavier use of subordinate clauses.

 

Is Lazarillo the work of a single author, or a collection of stories by different authors that aggregated over a long time?

(When I was a kid I used to read an Italian children's magazine that once published the adventures of Lazarillo del Tormes as a graphical summary.  The story was so popular with the readers that, after the original ran out, the magazine started to publish "New Adventures" with the same boy in similar settings and plots.  I suppose that the same must have happened right after the original appeared in Spain...)

(And some time ago I learned that the longest known poem in the world is believed to be the Tibetan  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., with 120 volumes and over a million verses.  Which of course were added by countless poets and bards over many centuries and several countries of Central Asia...)

The Manx text is clearly different (but very away from the Voynich). It forms a compact network with shorter paths and higher clustering. It seems to be a morphologically rich language.

AFAIK Celtic languages differ from Romance and English in that they still have noun inflections for grammatical case, besides gender and number.  And  some may attach a definite article to the noun.