[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections

[Torsten]

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The transition is not abrupt. Cosine similarity analysis between folios shows the transition from Currier A to B "descends smoothly, almost linearly, with increasing rank" with "the complete absence of any sudden change in the slope" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 307). The intermediate forms <chol> → <cheol> → <cheo> → <chey> → <chedy> document a gradual transformation through minimal edits (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Words typical for Currier A exist in Currier B, but not the other way round. This is continuous evolution, not an abrupt switch. The folio vector analysis in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (2018) independently supports this: their Voynich folio vectors "cluster into a single large group" with no definitive A/B separation.

The 20% error rate is not a finding. It is a measure of how far the actual text deviates from your expectation of what it should look like. But consider what "correcting" those errors would produce: substituting rare word forms with more common ones would increase overall text repetition, pushing the text further toward the excessive redundancy that already distinguishes Voynichese from natural language. The corrections would make the text less language-like, not more. This is self-defeating: the hypothesis that errors explain unusual forms leads to a "corrected" text that fits the language hypothesis worse than the original.