The oddities of the bigram "ed"

[Dunsel]

Thus statistics of words and word pairs are usually more illuminating than statistics of characters or digraphs.

All the best, --stolfi

I understand what you're saying about bigram statistics being driven by common words and subject matter. That absolutely happens in natural languages. Your examples make sense in that context.  But what I'm seeing here doesn’t look like normal topic drift.  I'm not just saying that “ed is frequent.”  I'm saying that a very high-frequency bigram simply disappears on many pages, and then appears heavily on others, within and across topics. That kind of page-level on/off behavior is what caught my attention.

If there’s a natural-language example where a very high-frequency digraph shows this kind of behavior, I’d genuinely be interested to see it. It would help clarify whether what we’re seeing here is unusual or not.

And yes, I agree that word-level analysis is important. That’s exactly what I’ll be looking at in the next post. This one was just meant to introduce the pattern and explain why I split the Voynich into two regimes for further testing.