"The Currier languages revisited" revisited

[kckluge]

Is it reasonable safe to say that B is more advanced and this likely was invented after A?

*Sigh* It's treacherous to interpret geometry in some feature space in terms of history/process, but if space aliens put a raygun to my head and forced me to bet, that's how I'd go. Not so much Herbal B, but definitely Starred paragraphs B, and especially Bio B. If I had to guess: whatever the underlying "system" is, the early Herbal A bifolia are the original form. I'd have to look closely at Rene's dialect assignments to be sure, but I'd potentially go so far as to suggest that the initial three pure Herbal A/Scribe 1 quires may be the oldest layer and got bound together because they had always been together (even if not nested). The reason everything isn't in Herbal A is because there is something wrong with it -- some weakness in the "key" used that offers a chink into breaking the "system". Scribe 1's effort to fix this is the dialect used in the Pharma pages and the Herbal A pages close to them in both bigram frequency space and the binding. Scribe 4's effort is the non-label dialect used in the Astro/Cosmo & Zodiac quires. Scribes 2 & 3 go in a different direction, with Herbal B being the initial cut that gets refined (whether sequentially or in parallel) into the Starred paragraph pages & Bio pages dialects.

One more question if you have time - what happens when you label scribal hands instead of topics? Maybe it's possible to combine both in each data point (symbol for topic / color for Hand) or use dots with an outer ring so each data point has 2 attributes? Unfortunately I don't have time to play with the data at the moment...

With the exception of the "rose" diagram, the Herbal A/Pharma/Astro/Zodiac PCA plot from earlier in the thread essentially does that for Scribes 1 & 4. Looking at Scribes 2 & 3, I agree looking at Herbal B/Scribe 2 vs. Bio/Scribe 2 vs. Herbal B/Scribe 3 vs. Starred para/Scribe 3 (vs. Rose/Scribe 2 as well maybe) might be illuminating, but I'm not sure how quickly I'll get around to it. I spent *way* too much time thinking about the Voynich last week. If only to get closure and make progress on actually finishing the dang thing, I'll probably work on getting Part 1 of "Deciphering Murder", my Voynich Mss./Midsomer Murders mashup fanfic, ready for posting in the "Voynich Talk" subforum over the holidays. (If I had any idea it was going to turn into a novella-length work, I never would have started...hopefully people will enjoy.)