New Research: Quantitative analysis of lexical independence in MS 408 (DIS Model)

[nablator]

Hi,

I guess the C layer is the Currier part of the transliteration.

#  C: Currier's transcription plus new additions from members of the
#      voynich list as found in the file voynich.now.

"C lines" would be more understandable than "transcription column C", because they are found in specific lines of the text file. However the N column (number of lines?) doesn't match the number of lines in the LSI file, so I don't know either what is N or what is C...

The analysis would make more sense if the length of lines was normalized somehow (lines could be truncated or wrapped at xx columns), instead of kept as it is in the transliteration file: of course the "mean J" results depend a lot on the length of the lines: you can't compare sections that have a very different average (and distribution) of the length of lines.

In the Moving Average Type Token Ratio statistics, for examples, the size of the rolling window matters.

Comparing the mean J value of sections of the VMS to "Medieval Latin Baselines" makes no sense because there is no baseline, and Voynichese is not Latin. Every manuscript is different, the length of the lines is not a constant. Some scribes write big letters, some write small letters. Herbals sometimes use the available space around the illustrations, sometimes the full width of the page, like the VMS. Some scribes write words more abbreviated than others. The number of words per line varies.

Edit after reading your last post:

Even when truncating Latin strings to match VMS line lengths, the J-index remains significantly higher. I will include a more detailed sensitivity analysis on segment length in the next iteration.

Yes that would be the first thing to do. Then try other languages if you want to claim that the VMS is outside the range of natural languages.

Your statistical results do not require a "reset" at each line, whatever that means, this is completely unjustified. "DIS" or "modular architecture" is not an hypothesis without some precise definition and explanation of why you think that it would explain anything.