The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

This is an interesting case, but let's consider another one.

Thanks for the statistics! But I think they confirm my point...

For your "and", the percentage of [s] at end of preceding words is 26.1% -- still higher than average, though not by as much.

For me, the "-s" before "and" is almost three times the overall frequency of "-s".  The difference may be because I included the subsection headers, like "Vertues and uses:" -- and thus "vertues" turned out to be the most common word before "and", by far.

Neither your example nor mine shows quite the kind of word profile we actually find around word-break combinations with skewed statistics in the Voynich Manuscript, in my experience. Importantly, I don't recall seeing anything like your "vertues" or my "they" that suggests whole words are driving the patterns as opposed to individual morphological elements -- glyphs, bigrams, and such.

However, the enhanced frequency of "-y" before "qo-" must be due due to the word frequency distribution before "qo-" being different from the overall distribution.  Especially since, as you claim, the glyphs before the "-y" have an effect too.  

But even if we look just at Culpeper, that 36.1% for [s] before [are] seems to demonstrate that the kind of statistic we're considering here can be meaningful and revealing.

My point is that the statistics of the character "-s" before "are" do not tell us anything except that there is some deviation from statistical independence.  That alone is neither meaningful nor revealing.   We only begin to understand why the deviation exists by looking at the words that caused it.  

In fact, the existence such deviations is not remarkable by itself.  If the text is meaningful, there will be correlations between consecutive words, and these will almost always cause correlations between the last glyph of a word and the first glyph of the next one.  Or even between the first glyph of a word and the last  glyph of the next one.  (In my Culpeper file, I bet that the word before "and" will have an anomalous tendency to begin with "v"...)

What would be remarkable would be the absence of such deviations -- that is, if the frequency of any ending like -y was the same independently from the beginning of the next word.  That would be very unlikely to happen, whether the text was meaningful or gibberish.  In a modern encrypted text that independence could happen if the first and last letters of each word were randomly selected nulls, or if the encryption was a Vigenère cipher using the digits of Pi as the key, or if the text was generated by a Markov process of order zero, etc..  But these possibilities would be very unlikely for a text created in the early 1400s.

All the best, --stolfi