Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[npcompl33t]

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

Thank you for taking a look, I appreciate your feedback.

My first impression is that there may be a bit of circularity in your approach.

This is fair, I think I addressed this in my response to you in the chronology thread, where i showed that even using Currier x Section shows the same linear drift between steps.

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

This goes back to the horseshoe pattern discussion a bit, but in your example you are just sorting on one or two dimensions. I looked across all dimensions. If many dimensions move together, there is a real underlying factor. In the book example, if a publisher changed ther height and width of their books gradually each year, you would indeed find this ordering using the same methods I've been describing.

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

It doesn't suggest the ordering is not meaningful. Reversals are exactly what you would expect with changes that are random drifts.

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."

Herbal A and B are the same topic, format, and style, and yet are significantly different. This was the same difference you and I had discussed and was the motivation behind this analysis.

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."

The pages within each section are not stastically homogenous, even if we fully exclude Herbal A and B from this. I found meaningful splits in stars and Herbal A. Pages within a single bifolia can be modeled as H1 describes, and when doing so virtually all pages within i bifolio occur within 1.5% of each other on my identified time axis.

The forms with a “d” after the “e” run (chedy, shedy, kedy, tedy, keedy, teedy) are practically nonexistent up to rank 124,

This is an accurate observation, but I want to point out that we are missing multiple bifolia that probably would have occured prior to this section, and there is a gap in the overall chronolgy here. f58 and some astro prose shows indications of a transition, in particular, dy usage actually starts there, which would appear to be a precursor of the edy change,  so I still think that we can't say for certain if the change is as abrupt as it appears, or if it is a result of the missing sections.

First, the new rows in the table duplicate existing ones. “chedy” is distributed across the preceding glyphs almost exactly like “chey” (ch/sh-heavy), and “cheedy” almost exactly like “cheey” (k-heavy). No new pattern emerges; rather, it’s a second spelling for an existing one. The bulk of this comes primarily from “chy,” which drops from 14% to 3%. No row or column disappears.

I suspect that the exact transformation path one assumes here will dramatically change some reesults. I think chey and chy are probably related, they exhibit an almost flat frequency profile when examiend together. I suspect chol->cheol-> chedy and chor->cheor-> chedy. This is similar but slightly different than Torsten's chain which groups chol, cheol, cheo, chey all together as they are within a few edit distance of each other. The differences here are dramatic, as i will explain in my follow-up post below. Grouping words like Torsten's proposal, based on edits, generally preserves frequency distributions at the cost of destroying information. Different routes can be taken that sacrifice frequency preservation for information retention.