Independent Analysis Identifying Languages Beyond Currier A/ B, compared to René Zand

[npcompl33t]

I finished an updated analysis on this, and expanded the classification scheme down another level. At this level, I don' think its fair to refer to these differences as 'languages', 'dialects', etc. But there is obviously still observable glyph level statistics that would be odd in a normal language, and that can confound certain analysis that are focused on glyph-level traits. 

Below are these classifications, and you can actually explore the different transitions/bigrams that help distinguish them You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 

   

A few things to note:

• The traits that the lowest levels represent are mostly gradients, or a continuum, not binary. This clustering separates them, but these are more akin to overlapping distributions, or a single spectrum, than distinct populations. 
  
• The later sections are generally more reliably differentiated more reliably due to having more text. Many of the herbal pages simply don't have enough text, and their internal divergence is high enough, that it is hard to reliably put individual sheets into different groups. Pooling at the bifolio level does show obvious differences, because most pages in a bifolio agree, but individual sheets are harder to say for certain. 
  
• I have tagged which pages are firmly within the distinct cluster, which are tentative, and which have low confidence.
  
• When splitting stars in half by the method used in my previous post, it turns out each half more closely resembles either Bio or the other Herbal B sections rather than forming a distinct node.
  
• The most interesting finding, by far, is that across virtually all pages in the manuscript, ke/te and ka/ta are strongly anticorrelated, although the exact level tends to form a gradient. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Bio and Stars as a whole, ka/ta and ke/te are below -.7 correlated, which is so extreme im certain people here have already caught this.
  

The web app allows you to select any level and view what differentiates the leaves on that branch, along with charts like the following, so see it for a full breakdown. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and it contains information about confidence level, as well as notes in cases where judgement calls were made.

   

You may ask why such categories are helpful, and in some cases, they may not be. However, it is obvious that there are still significant differences captured by this grouping. For example,  Early Herbal A is split into 1a and 1b. In 1a, words that start with ch* occur at nearly 2x the rate as 1b. Words like chol and shol drop by about 50% between 1a and 1b. I'm very interested in why chol occurs more often in Herbal A than in Currier B sections, and the fact it occurs 2x as often on some as others is an important clue.


Looking back at RZ's classifications, its clear some of his previous 'outlier' pages are actually picking up on the same features I'm identifying here.

For example, in17v we both detect a Pharma-like departure from Early A. In his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., he speculated that Herbal B and Stars might split into two groups, as they have here, and his classification features partially recover some of the differences, but sometimes the other rules end up suppressing these signals. For example, the two Herbal B clusters straddle RZ's 12.5% 'ed' C/B cutoff, and his scheme partial recovers that by splitting the group among C/B tags. His scheme almost recovers the Stars split this way as well, as the two groups sit at 15.30%/29.49%, just above the 12.5% cutoff.