Measuring Long-Range Structure in the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

Please let me know

I have similar curves for H1-H2(d) but the values are different, probably because the data and preprocessing are different. I removed all punctuation, parenthesis, brackets, apostrophes, numbers (including some internal and external references), spaces, and everything is converted to lowercase.

Voynich data from RF1b-er (basic_EVA) including "?". Paragraph text only.

Great

It seems that your Voynich curves have the same pattern as mine. Raw and shuffled seem to look very simmilar, but shuffled is shifted a bit lower in terms of final MI, while the natural languages seem to loose the softr decay of H1-H2(d) at short medium d, once the words are shuffled, keeping the same final MI).

I guess the natural languages loose the mid range connections once the words are shuffled, but they stil tend to the same final MI. But the Voynich really seems not to have this kind of connection and it looses even MI when shuffled.

Your Ambrosius plots looks more to a natural language than mine Did you take the same psalm?

About the results, I think the difference may be about where the structure of the text actually comes from.
In natural languages, a lot of the structure is spread everywhere. Words have internal patterns, the same endings and letter combinations appear again and again, and the overall “feel” of the language stays quite stable throughout the text. When we shuffle the words, we break the logical flow of sentences, but we do not destroy this underlying texture. That is why the final level of mutual information stays about the same, even if the curve reaches it more quickly.

In Torsten’s text, and possibly in the Voynich, more of the structure seems to depend directly on the order of the words themselves. If each word is strongly influenced by the previous one, then changing the order really removes part of the structure. That could explain why the shuffled version ends up with a lower final mutual information.

So I think natural languages keep much of their structure even when word order is broken, while Torsten’s text and the Voynich seem to rely more on the sequence of words itself. So this could mean that the Voynich might have been written in a way where the order of the words plays a much bigger role than in normal languages, and that changing this order removes part of its structure (that's why final MI is lower in the shuffled text)..