Inside the Voynich Network: graph analysis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Maybe a good test would be to pass a text translated into not so near languages like Portuguese and Spanish, and see how the graph behaves. Because then, if the dots are close, we will have a tool to study the Voynich text independently from the alphabet or the "language".

Good idea!  Here are some versions of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Old Testament) in various languages.  From my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:  

• You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Chinese (Mandarin) in GB (Guo Biao) 2312 encoding, 2 bytes per character.
  
• You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Hebrew, with vowel marks, in an ad-hoc "phoneticish" encoding.
  
• You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Latin (Vulgate) 
  
• You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Russian, KOI8-R encoding.
  
• You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Vietnamese, VIQR encoding with a few changes. (You already have this one.)
  

In each of these folders there is a file "main.src" which is the source text -- heavily edited, recoded, and reformatted by me.  The markup is rather complicated, and varies somewhat from file to file; but ignoring all lines starting with '#' or '@' should give a clean text, apart from recoding and a few special punctuation (such as "=" for end-of-paragraph).

There is also a file "main.wds" that has the "main.src" digested into a more uniform format, with one word or punctuation per line.  The first letter identifies the entry ("a" for text word, "p" for punctuation, "s" for symbol, etc.), with the object itself after a space.  This file may be easier to convert to your format than the "main.src" one.

At the top of each of these files there are a few "@chars" lines that specify the characters that can appear as parts of words (@chars alpha), of punctuation (@chars punct), and of numbers or other symbols (@chars symbol)

The files are all in the ISO-latin-1 encoding, so you must pipe them through "recode latin-1..utf8" if your software expects Unicode.  And be sure to use "wget" or the "Save link as..." button of your browser, rather than opening the file in the browser and copy-pasting the contents.

Let me know if you need help.  (For instance, I think I can convert the Chinese file to phonetic pinyin. I have the recipe saved somewhere. But I don't know whether the conversion will be 100% correct...)

All the best, --stolfi