The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 3 : It's not just "ed"

[Jorge_Stolfi]

That is the count of ho and ed normalized by 1000 tokens.  The vertical bar represents where my ed0 ends and ed+ begins. These two charts are essentially showing that the bigram ho and the bigram ed are swapping midfix dominance.  All of those pages in the ed+ where they do swap is where ed has it's lowest counts.  So even pages where ed occurs only a few times, ho is still the dominant midfix.

Thanks for the work!  Numbers are always good.  

However, let me repeat this advice: statistics of characters (bigrams, trigrams, etc.) can be only puzzling, not illuminating.  You can plot them in a thousand different ways, and will not conclude anything besides "something is different".

It would be like studying ecology by counting and tabulating animals according to color, or length of tail, or number of black spots -- lumping elephants with squirrels, macaws with lizards, polar bears with caterpillars.  At most you would be able to tell that the Sahara and Antarctica are different from the Amazon, but will never really understand how or why.

If you want to understand the "language A / language B" riddle, you must look at words and try to understand how they map (or not) between the two languages.  Are there words that have similar frequencies in both languages?  Are there patterns involving those words in one language that seem to match patterns in the other language? And so on.

For instance, I suspect that there is a correspondence between the words of the two languages, such that  corresponding words have the same number of gallows, and same number of "dealers" (the characters d l r s), and the same number of dealers on each side of the gallows -- even if the gallows may be different, and some dealers may be replaced by other dealers, possibly non-deterministiclaly, and the other Voynichese glyphs (q, a, o, y, Ch, Sh, ee, and their e modifiers) may be added, deleted, or replaced more freely.

The variation of frequencies of ed, ho, and other digraphs would be just shadows of this hypothetical word-level mapping.

For instance, according to my seven-slot ("crust-mantle-core") word model, the digraph ed can occur only when one of the "e-bench" elements E = {  {Che}  {She}  {ee}  {eee} } or one of the "e-gallows" F = {  {ke}  {te}  {CKhe}  {CThe} } is followed by a {d} element.  That already "explains" why ed is never word-initial. That model also predicts that, in a worth that has a gallows, ed cannot appear before the gallows. 

So, the fact that ed does not occur in language A could be because, for every word wB in language B that has an E or F element followed by a {d} element, either the word wB has no correspondent in language A, or its "translation" wA in language A:

• Has the {d} replaced by {l}, {r}, or {s}
  
• Has nothing in place of  the E element
  
• Has the E element replaced by {Ch} or {Sh} (without the e)
  
• Has the F element replaced by {k}, {t}, {CHk}, or {CTh} (without the e)
  
• Has some element from { {Ch} {Sh} {k} {t} {CKh} {CTh} {o} {a} {y} } inserted before the {d}.
  

Can we narrow down these possibilities? Does the mapping wA <-> wB follow any general rules?

All the best, --stolfi