Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I am still trying to parse all the data you have produced.  

Who or what is "Golf"?  The Voynich Search Engine does not seem to know either...

My first impression is that there may be a bit of circularity in your approach.  You separate the pages into groups based on certain text statistics, sort the groups into an order from "Early A" to "Bio" according to some of those statistics, and then observe that there is a gradation in some other text statistics along the same ordering.  

This observation only shows that there is some correlation between the criteria used for sorting the sections in the first place and the other text statistics.  Such correlations are expected, but they do not confirm that the ordering is significant.

Going back to the book sorting example, if you sort a hundred random books by height, you will find that the width also seems to gradually vary as you move along that sequence.  That observation shows that height and width are correlated variables, which is a significant observation; but it does not make the ordering any more meaningful.

The fact that some of the word replacement rules are reversed at some point suggests that the ordering in fact is not meaningful. 

Here are two "null hypotheses" that would be the alternative to the "linear evolution" claim:

• H0. "The variations in the text statistics from section to section are essentially all determined by changes of topic, text format, text structure, and style."
  
• H1. "The pages within each section are statistically homogeneous, and can be well modeled as random Gaussian-like deviations from a single central word frequency distribution."
  

Hypothesis H0 says, in particular, that Stars and Bio have similar word frequency distributions (WFDs) because they deal with the same topic, and/or possibly because they use the same style (like imperative vs.conditional, telegraphic vs. full sentences, etc.)  But that does not mean that they were created in sequence.  It could well be that Bio was the first section to be written and Stars the last one, or the other way around; with all the other sections written in between.

(In particular, I think I know what the word chedy means in the Stars section; and it is something that would naturally be heavily mentioned in Bio too, but not so much in the other sections.)

Hypothesis H0 does not deny that some changes in the WDFs may be directly caused by the mere passage of time, which would have caused the Author to gradually change his word usage preferences.  It says only that such changes are swamped by the changes due to topic &c.  

H0 also does not deny that the Author may have made a massive "spelling reform" at some point; but implies that a spelling change would be hard to distinguish from a change of topic that required a substantial change in the lexicon.

So, what arguments or evidence do you have against H0 and H1?

All the best, --stolfi