The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 2: Same as it ever was.

[Dunsel]

Great post, Dunsel. I like these kinds of analyses, since they attempt to get closer to the heart of what Voynichese is.

Thank you!

1. Some of the differences you discuss would disappear when somehow normalized for text length. Unique tokens, hapax, reuse... So I wonder if your whole first section could be summarized as "Q20 has many words per page"?

Nope.  I can completely shuffle any of the pages in the Voynich and get those results. And, to be honest, if I really applied that chaining to a natural language, I'd probably get the same results eventually. The stand out point is just how close these pages are to each other.  Not my next post but part 4, I'm really going to dig into repair.

[*]2. I am very interested in ways to kind of smoothen out and "repair" things. If it's always "aiin" but then suddenly "oiin", we may wonder whether the thing that looks like "o" was actually supposed to be one. I also think splitting hapax that are compounds is a valid strategy. 

[*]
I'm thinking, those were scribal choices. I did choose to split them because it's well known that transcription errors occur.  Most of the time, I consider it just statistical noise. In that case, I dug into the noise just to see if I could fix them.

[*]

[*]Edit distance 1 is also a good way to account for scribal and transcription errors. However, edit distance 2 and 3 feels like a lot in a poor system like Voynichese. Especially when doing it blindly without noting the underlying patterns.

You are correct. If you have a word length of 3 and an edit distance of 3 then you're changing the entire word.  And in this case, I didn't worry about that because in another post, I'm going to show how that edit distance >3 becomes insignificant.  Right now, I'm just demonstrating the surface features.