19-05-2026, 11:33 PM
(19-05-2026, 11:01 PM)Dunsel wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That is not “anything goes” drift. It suggests continuity of method with different weighting. Scribe 2 is much more sharply reweighted toward "ed" bigram type forms, while Scribe 3 appears closer to Scribe 1 in some respects, especially when separated by section.
I would suggest that you distinguish for S2 between Herbal B and Quire 13. Both are attributed to Scribe 2 by Davis, but they behave very differently:
| Section | Davis's scribe | Word count | <ed> rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Herbal A | Scribe 1 | 7,257 | 0.23% |
| Pharma A | Scribe 1 | 2,529 | 0.67% |
| Quires 9–12 (Astro / Cosmo) | Scribe 4 | 2,691 | 9.55% |
| Herbal B | Scribe 2 | 2,695 | 17.03% |
| Quire 20 (Stars B) | Scribe 3 | 10,683 | 19.40% |
| Quire 13 (Biological B) | Scribe 2 | 6,915 | 27.84% |
The progression Herbal B → Quire 20 → Quire 13 is monotonic, with the <ed> rate increasing by a factor of 1.6× from Herbal B to Quire 13. Davis's scribal partition cuts orthogonally across this gradient: Herbal B and Quire 13 are both attributed to Scribe 2 yet differ by 10.8 percentage points in <ed> rate, while Quire 20 is attributed to Scribe 3 yet its <ed> rate (19.4%) sits between the two same-scribe sections.
If you compute the correlation between S2 Herbal B and S2 Quire 13, I expect it will be lower than your S2 vs S3 correlation of 0.948 — despite being the same "scribe." That would mean the within-scribe variation exceeds the between-scribe variation, which is hard to reconcile with a multiple-scribe model but follows naturally from a continuous evolutionary gradient.