A One-Page Ledger Method for Generating Voynich-Like Text

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I reworked one of my comparison tests to operate at the sheet level. What this appears to show is that the manuscript is not behaving like a collection of unrelated pages. Certain sheets are much more similar to specific other sheets than to the manuscript as a whole, especially in Quire 13 and Quire 20.

I won't comment about other quires, bu the numbers for Quire 20 are just what is expected from 

1. vocabulary and word frequencies determined by topic (that is, high correlation within the quire, low correlation with other quires) and
   
2. text consisting of a collection of independent paragraphs whose order depends only slightly on their contents (that is, about the same correlation between any two sheets within Quire 20).
   

That is consistent with what I would expect from a copy-and-modify process, where words and word families are repeatedly reused and gradually altered over time, creating clusters of closely related sheets instead of uniformly random text.

On the contrary, the copy-and-modify process should create a gradual transition across quires and sections. 

Maybe there is a reordering of the sheets that will make the transitions between sections less abrupt. But that would be an artifact of the reordering, not a real gradual change. 

All the best, --stolfi