The oddities of the bigram "ed"

[Dunsel]

I like your first graph, which is very striking.
Just a minor question or perhaps a nitpick: what exactly do you mean with:

That is "ed" compared to the top 100 bigrams by total count and percentage of pages.

These would be two different lists. Is it the superset of these two lists, or rather the cross-section?

With respect to Currier, in his paper he has a list of points that help to distinguish his A vs. B languages. While 'ed' only appears in B language, he never mentions this bigram as a discriminator.

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There is some overlap with what you are showing.

Also, in your first graph, there are some points near the top (close to 100% of page coverage) but with a relatively low total count. These may be of interest as well.

Finally, bigram statistics depend heavily on the transliteration alphabet. It would be worth using something different than Eva, not because it would be better or worse, but because it may bring a different (additional) perspective. This will not affect the specific bigram 'ed' too much though, so if that is your main focus, it is not too important.

First, thank you for the reply. Getting a chance to speak to the Voynich legends on here constantly humbles me.

My labels may not have been clear. What I did was count the number of times ed occurs anywhere in the Voynich (x axis) and count the number of pages it appears on (y axis) and show that as a percentage.  It's compared to the top 100 bigrams using the same measurements.  I refined my charts below so it's normalized rather than by percentage.

I have studied some of your findings in the past but for the purpose of these tests I tried to go in pretending ignorance without any assumptions and see where the numbers led me.  I knew of the existence of what Currier found but I specifically avoided knowing exactly which pages were defined. I didn't overlay his work until I identified the ed "expansion."  I believe, on my next post when I show some of the tests I've conducted, that while there are a number of differences on those pages, that language A and B can be explained as as the same system being used in the pages without ed with just a few 'enhancements'.

As for other bigrams, yes I have looked at some. And here's an interesting tidbit.  The letter o.  Very early, o has 12 other letters that can be added to the end of it to make a bigram.  By the time you get to the end of the 0ed pages I identified, it has 17 of the 19 possible. (I'm only counting 20 glyphs, no weirdos, and excluding v as it appears on exactly one page as both a prefix and a suffix, I've yet to really dig into it.)  And, I think that's part of what explains the ed explosion. I'll get more into detail about that in a later post.

To answer your question regarding the transliteration, ed is not the main focus.  Finding it was more the keystone event that led me down a rabbit hole and is significant in it's ability to define the two distinct sections that Currier identified some 50 years ago.  But, your questions got my curiosity up as well.  I had checked against your transcription, but no other comparison.  So here they are.


   

Here's ed from your transcription.

   

This is from the FSG which I downloaded from your site.

   

Glen Claston 1b

   

Bram Stoker's Dracula 

   

And Julius Caesar's Cicero for comparison

Thank you again for making me think a bit harder about this!