Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I linked to several papers and even a multivariate analysis textbook on this, i stand by that statement and i think the sources I linked to support it. If you disagree with them

Indeed I do.  Just because something is claimed in many thick "scientific" books that are respected by many scientists in a field it does not mean that the claim is true.

I already cited the example of the "technical analysis" of stocks.  There is also a vast literature on meta-heuristics and dozens of methods that thousands of people swear by.  With thousands of Ph.D. theses and tenure applications.  But practically all of it is easily proved to be nonsense.

I hope you will read my last message and the new post on the evolution sequence.

The relation between "language A" and "language B" is indeed a promising line of inquiry.  I am quite open to the idea that there may be a mostly "orthographic" mapping of words to words that makes the word frequencies of those two sets mostly equal (apart from sampling noise).  Have you seen You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

I looked at that post that you linked, but I was confused.  There is to much data. I will try have a second look but it may take a while. Meanwhile, here is some free advice:

Do not try to analyze the A/B transition over the whole VMS.  While there may be some general features or processes that are valid through the whole book, different sections are obviously about very different topics in different formats.  Those changes alone will undoubtedly have an impact on whatever statistics you are using in the analysis, and will probably swamp those hypothetical "universals" that you are seeking.

Therefore, you should confine the analysis to Herbal-A and Herbal-B only.  At least those two sections appear to be about the same topic (plants) in the same format (1-3 parags of running text per plant).  You should exclude even Pharma: while the topic may be similar, the format is obviously very different.

And be careful to not impose, explicitly or unconsciously, the assumption that the A/B transition is gradual.  In particular, be warned that reordering the pages by some similarity criterion is far more likely to manufacture a gradient than to reveal one.  See that example of sorting books by similarity of size.

Beware that, even if the difference between A and B is purely a change of orthography, it may not apply systematically.  Suppose for example an Italian writer who decides at some point to change the spelling of the "open o" sound (like English "not") from "o" to "w", while keeping the "closed o" sound (like German "so") spelled as "o".  Then he would start writing "pollo" as "pwllo" but would continue writing "bollo" as "bollo".

Remember also that character-based statistics (character and digram frequencies, entropies, etc.) are mere projections of word statistics -- and projection can easily make things more confusing rather than more transparent. For instance,  the count of "th" on each page of an English book is the sum of the counts of "the", "this", "that", "thus", "they", "there", "think", "fifth", "bath", etc.  Thus comparing the frequency of "th" on two pages or two books is  actually a very complex comparison.  Comparing the relative frequencies of "that" and "which" would make more sense than comparing the frequencies of "th" and "wh".

Besides, the VMS is unlikely to be all original work by the Author.  While the language seem to be mostly the same throughout the book (apart from A/B and smaller differences), it is very likely that each section is a translation, transcription, or adaptation of a different "ur-book", written by a different author in a different place and epoch.  In particular, Herbal-A and Herbal-B may well be derived from two distinct herbals.  In that case, even simple differences in style (like "if you eat this herb then you will see ghosts" versus "eating this herb makes one see ghosts") could explain the A/B differences -- but then all the language changes should be simultaneous and abrupt.

All the best, --stolfi