Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[npcompl33t]

 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.?

Yes, i have seen that. You have shared your post with me multiple times now, and I have even incorporated the same chart of yours directly into my app. Your work has directly influenced my analysis and my conclusions here.

I analyzed the Black Book of Basingwerk's famous orthographic shift earlier in this thread, and included the same MDS plot. It does not show a horseshoe like voynich. However, that is because it has a 'sudden' orthographic shift. 

In the Napier example, the way he reports his case logs slightly varies over the course of the first few years of his logs. This also creates a horseshoe, for an orthographic like reason, changing conventions. It also shows not *all* words need to be impacted for there to be a gradient.

LFD has speculated that the VMS was never intended to be bound, and were instead loose collections of bifolia. My work here shows there is a temporal sequence, but the scale of time is unknown. What if, for example, these were all written over the course of months or even a few year? Maybe the scribes were recording some previous collection that was written over a much longer time span. Maybe this was some sort of medieval equivalent to a weekend side project that extended for some time. In that case, orthographic shifts would appear gradually.

I think far to much effort has been spent arguing over whether the gradient exists rather than trying to understand what could actually explain such a gradient. There are reasons why an invented script would show this kind of drift aside from self citation. Real languages drift like this over certain time resolutions. 

If it truly is self citation as opposed to some sort of drift over true semantic meaning, then the changes that occur should appear randomly and should not be concerned with preserving information across the gradient. 

And be careful to not impose, explicitly or unconsciously, the assumption that the A/B transition is gradual. 

I did not encode this assumption. My analysis started exactly as you described, comparing Herbal A/B. My initial assumption was the opposite of this, and you can You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. over the course of the analysis in the thread i created.

The conclusions of this thread directly came from the analysis you are describing, which did not encode that assumption.

Remember also that character-based statistics (character and digram frequencies, entropies, etc.) are mere projections of word statistics 

I am very aware of this. My analysis used a transition matrix / first order markov representation of the text, but it is still word projections. I've shown however, as with both the Napier and BBoB example that this does capture real meaning in the way you would expect. 

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.

This is exactly the thing that would cause a gradient to appear. If the manuscript was indeed written over a wider period of time, if its conventions were not fixed, or it was actively being developed while written, all of these could introduce the type of continuous gradient the horseshoe pattern implies. 

I strongly believe that VMS research as a whole would benefit from shifting the debate away from 'is there a gradient' to 'what mechanisms could cause this gradient and how can we distinguish between them'.