Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Here's another chart on this topic; as you can see, the pharmaceutical sector aligns very well with A...

Thanks for the clear chart!  

But are you including labels in the statistics?  What about parag-initial lines?

Changes in character and digraph statistics may be due to several causes, including different 

1. languages or dialects,
   
2. spelling rules, 
   
3. scribal quirks ,
   
4. overall prose styles, 
   
5. or subject matter. 
   

Or some mix of them.

None of these causes would result in a simple set of character-based mapping between languages A and B.  

Even for very similar languages (#1) the mapping is likely to be very irregular.  Here are the counts and frequencies of occurrence (in %) of the 20 most frequent words in the Portuguese novel Dom Casmurro and in a (human) translation of the same novel into Spanish:
 2681  4.1 que     3001  4.3 de
 2490  3.8 a       2549  3.7 la
 2187  3.4 e       2509  3.6 que
 1971  3.0 de      2086  3.0 y
 1673  2.6 o       1607  2.3 a
 1530  2.3 não     1558  2.2 el
  775  1.2 um      1508  2.2 no
  664  1.0 os      1309  1.9 en
  663  1.0 é       1093  1.6 me
  628  1.0 da       881  1.3 los
  609  0.9 mas      800  1.1 un
  593  0.9 do       766  1.1 se
  571  0.9 se       703  1.0 con
  555  0.9 era      670  1.0 las
  543  0.8 para     631  0.9 lo
  537  0.8 as       602  0.9 mi
  536  0.8 com      583  0.8 pero
  533  0.8 eu       544  0.8 por
  490  0.8 me       517  0.7 le
  461  0.7 em       511  0.7 una
The approximate mapping for the words on the left would be
  que    que
  a      la | a
  e      y
  de     de
  o      el | lo
  não    no
  um     uno
  os     los
  é      es
  da     de la
  mas    pero
  do     de lo
  se     si | se
  era    era
  para   para
  as     las
  com    con
  eu     yo
  me     mi | me
  em     en
with complications like oblique pronouns being separate words in Portuguese but often joined to the verb in Spanish.

Even a spelling rule change (#2) will probably be more complicated than "every instance of ed is now written de".  It could be like "the plural  of a noun ending in consonant plus -y shall henceforth end in -ies instead of -ys, so "babys" is to be spelled "babies"; unless the letter before the -y is a vowel "u" pronounced as  "w",  like "soliloquy", or the noun is a compound of non-noun words like "flyby".  This change does not apply to verbs in the 3d person like "stays", nor to possessives like "baby's"".

As for scribal quirks (#3), I am all but certain that the glyph m is an abbreviation of iin (and maybe of other groups) that the Scribe could use when space was tight (like at the end of a line) or when he just felt lazy.  And I suspect that many ee may  be instances of Ch whose ligature faded away or was omitted by the Scribe; or, conversely, that Ch is basically an ee with a ligature added by to avoid ambiguity.  And I also strongly suspect that the Scribe often misread the Author's -iin as -ir, and his d as k or l or other glyphs. Thus some of the A/B differences may be changes in the frequency of these quirks -- e. g. if the Author's handwriting improved or got worse between his drafting or Herbals A and B.

As for (#4) and (#5), compare the frequencies (%) of the 20 most frequent words in Culpeper's herbal, Marco Ponzi's English translation of the Alchemists Herbal,  Well's War of the Worlds, and Agatha Christie's Affair at Styles:
  8.0 the    6.2 the      4.7 the    8.0 the     
  5.3 and    6.0 and      3.0 i      4.2 and     
  3.6 of     4.0 it       2.4 to     3.8 of     
  2.5 in     3.0 this     2.2 of     2.7 a       
  1.9 to     3.0 of       2.1 a      2.1 i       
  1.8 it     2.8 herb     2.0 and    2.0 to     
  1.7 or     2.4 for      1.8 it     1.7 in     
  1.6 a      2.1 in       1.7 that   1.4 was     
  1.6 is     2.0 will     1.6 was    1.3 that     
  1.0 with   1.9 take     1.6 you    1.1 it       
  0.8 that   1.7 a        1.5 in     1.0 had     
  0.8 as     1.6 be       1.3 he     0.8 my       
  0.8 are    1.5 to       1.0 is     0.7 as       
  0.8 for    1.4 with     0.9 not    0.7 with     
  0.6 them   1.3 is       0.9 had    0.7 at       
  0.6 be     1.3 if       0.9 she    0.7 he       
  0.5 by     1.3 them     0.8 her    0.6 on       
  0.5 also   1.2 or       0.8 but    0.6 were     
  0.5 which  1.1 on       0.7 his    0.6 for     
  0.5 but    1.0 healed   0.7 at     0.5 from
The first half dozen words in these lists have similar frequencies.  But note the word "I" in the last two texts, which hardly occurs in the first two.  That is an example of general style difference (#4) -- namely, the last two books are first-person narratives, while the first two are more impersonal.  Note also the anomalously high frequency of "this", "herb", "take", "will"m and "healed" in the second column, which is a consequence of its highly formulaic style ("herb XXX: for YYY, take this herb and they will be healed").  This is an example of differences due to both style (#4) and contents (#5).

All the best, --stolfi