Idea to find the word Root, Leaf, Stem, Flower & Seed.

[npcompl33t]

Here is the data from other historical reference works, as you can see root should be fairly obvious to spot when comparing Herbal vs other sections. 

I don't understand. Can you explain what you are counting and how it helps to spot the "root" words?

For example:
Abu Mashar (John translation) 269 (33 hits)

I suppose this is the translation by Johannes Hispalensis (John of Seville) of Flores Albumasaris (Flowers of Abu Ma'shar) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In it you managed to count words radix, radic* and found 269 on 33 pages or something like that?

The 269 is the normalized occurrences per 1M tokens. In all honestly frequency per 1M tokens is probably excessive for historical manuscripts, but that is a frequently used statistic in NLP. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. page reports the most common English words using the same statistics, under the FrSp column (speech) and FrWr (Writing). You can see 'the' is 39,605. Basically, for every 1 million words, 'the' in English tends to occur about 40k times. The purpose of using this number was you can compare these results, because it is quite extreme. For example, f167, with a value over 6k, would put it in the top 30 general English spoken word list. Although much lower for written words it is still quite high.

You are correct, this analysis used John of Seville’s translation of Abū Maʿshar’s Great Introduction. It found 33 total occurrences. 33 occurrences ÷ 111,325 tokens × 1,000,000 = 296.43.

Here are some examples:

p. 4, line 97
posui in eo radices huius artis
“I placed in it the foundations of this art”—astrological knowledge.

p. 219, line 279
radix cornu illius
“the root/base of its horn”—Taurus, in the third-decan passage.

p. 222, line 379
radix colli Urse Maioris
“the root/base of Ursa Major’s neck.”

p. 223, line 389
arbor magne radicis
“a tree with a large root”—a tree depicted in a decan description.

p. 307, line 1263
in radice nativitatis hominis
“in the radix of a person’s nativity”—the natal configuration.

EDIT: corrected numbers, the Top 30 / 6k was in reference to spoken words not written words.