Measuring Long-Range Structure in the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

The two Currier "languages" are the most prominent statistical inconsistencies but the "dialects" are not different in nature: they modify the unigram/bigram/trigram/word frequencies perceptibly at the level of a section, a page. Sometimes, but it's less frequent, a single paragraph or two strongly deviate from the rest of the page: there is no rule for the length of the apparently homogeneous blocks. Maybe nothing is homogeneous and we see only the most flagrant deviations, when some pattern or patterns suddenly become conspicuously frequent or absent. There are countless examples.

The inhomogeneities haven't been studied enough. I started a thread You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looking for a statistical tool that would help detect and categorize them.

Yes, I think you’re right that variation exists at many scales, and that A and B may just be the most visible statistical contrasts within a broader continuum. I don’t see the manuscript as neatly divided into perfectly homogeneous blocks either.

What I find interesting, though, is that the long-range gap behaves very consistently across all the tests we’ve run. It’s not just reacting to small local frequency shifts. When we concatenate large coherent blocks, the gap increases sharply. When we interleave them, it drops. That pattern keeps repeating.

And the clustering result is what makes me pause. When we clustered pages automatically using the same statistical features, without telling the algorithm anything about Currier A or B, it essentially recovered the A/B split on its own. That suggests the boundary is not just one deviation among many, but a real structural discontinuity.

I’m not saying this proves there are two distinct languages. But the magnitude of the effect between A and B is comparable to mixing different languages in natural corpora, while the variation inside A or inside B looks more like mixing slifhtly different language (eg. Latin and catalan).

So I agree that nothing may be fully homogeneous. But the gap gives us a quantitative way to measure how strong those block differences are, and at least in this sense, A and B don’t look like just minor fluctuations in a smooth continuum.

I will take a look to your thread. I think there might also be some connections to my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about automatic topic detection (where the distinction between A/B was also detected, and other subtopics emerged).