"The Currier languages revisited" revisited

[kckluge]

At the same time, I think there should be no doubt that internal variations both in Currier's A language and Currier's B language exist...

We are in vigorous agreement on that point.

...and that there is also an intermediate form.

I would argue that the question isn't "is Zodiac labelese statistically intermediate between non-label A and non-label B" -- I will cheerfully agree that it is -- but rather "what does that mean given that the Zodiac label text doesn't seem to be sampled from the same distribution as the non-label text on those same pages?" Especially given that Scribe 4 doesn't play much of a role in writing B language pages -- just the one stray Zodiac page whose non-label text lands on the B side of Currier Gulch and possibly the nine-circle side of the big foldout.

To really do an apples-to-apples comparison on the Zodiac label text vs non-label text I'll need to mod my page frequency analysis code to optionally exclude bigrams containing spaces from the total count for a page so that only within-word bigrams get counted rather than just deleting spaces from the non-label text, but I doubt that's going to make the Zodiac label text look that much more like the non-label text.

I'm not sure that the label samples are sufficiently large in the pharma (or balneological) sections to do a similar comparison there, although there may be some cosmo diagram pages that could be added to the pot as well.