23-12-2025, 03:49 AM
(20-12-2025, 04:26 PM)MarcoP wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I find the subject of an A/B switch vs a progressive drift very interesting. It would be great if this problem could get a clear answer.
I hadn't previously realized that Scribe 4 apparently played a major role in the A/B transition or switch.
As always, it is likely I made errors, but I tried computing the frequency of the bigram ‘ed’ in each zodiac page. It’s lucky that the order of these pages is known. I processed Circle and Label text both separately and together. As a reference, the average frequency of 'ed' in Currier B is ~4%.
After posting #44 earlier, I realized more clearly where our disagreement is coming from. Your plot above is addressing the question "to what extent is non-label word usage correlated with label word usage on a given Zodiac page as measured by % of words containing 'ed'?" And the plot does, in fact, show some level of correlation. The question I've been asking (perhaps not explicitly enough) is "to what extent are the non-label words drawn from the same underlying distribution as label words on a given Zodiac page as measured by overall bigram statistics?" If the answer to that question was yes, all three graphs on your plot would fall close to on top of each other.
The thing that's puzzling given your plot is why the Zodiac pages plot so differently in the larger bigram space with and without labels given that sample sizes make the "circles" and "all" graphs on your chart look very similar (at least for the 'ed' bigram). Best guess is that there are other bigrams where the difference is more marked or it reflects a larger pattern of difference over multiple bigrams.
It's possible to make an argument along the line of: labels are statistically different from the other words on the page because they're nouns or proper names, and those have a different distribution than words in general. The problem with an explanation like that is it undercuts arguing for Zodiac labelese as a bridge between A & B non-label text because it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.