Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[Mauro]

If many dimensions move together, there is a real underlying factor.

The use of the word "move" is already biased towards the interpretation of that "underlying factor" being time.

In the book example, height, width, volume, weight, number of words, number of pages, number of letters per page etc are all correlated variables.  But the ordering of books by any of those attributes is not significant.  It has nothing to do with the order in which they were written, printed, bought, or read -- which seems to be implied if one says that those variables "move together".

You may have seen You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  It shows that height and width of old manuscripts (at least, those in Rene's dataset) are indeed strongly correlated, so that the points (h,w) fall very close to a straight line.  I see several clusters of points (marked), but Rene apparently sees a continuum of sizes instead.  Either way, while the correlation is significant (and suggests some theories about the Medieval making and marketing of vellum), the ordering of the manuscripts along that line obviously is not significant. 

All the best, --stolfi

I'm sorry to interfere Jorge, but I think your example with books is surely valid, but too simplified for the work @npcompl33t is doing. You are right: one can always order books by height and this ordering usually means nothing. However, it could also mean something, for example the publisher has shrunk the height year by year to save costs. Having only the heights (one dimension) I agree with you that's impossibile to determine if the varying heights are due to a temporal evolution, but when the dimensions are many (the colour of the covers, the paper quality, the font size etc. etc.) and they co-vary this is a strong indication that there's an underlying evolution. If then one can determine an evolutionary sequence this is a strong indication that's the path the evolution took. Example: we have books 10 cm high with a blue cover and books 10 cm high but a red cover, then 9 cm high an blue, 9 cm high and green, 8 cm and green and so on. I think it's quite reasonable to conclude that the evolution probably was (10cm, red) -> (10cm, blue) -> (9cm, blue) -> (9cm, green) -> (8cm, green) and so on. And we just used two dimensions.


As you know, I also don't agree with you on the statement that 'the statistics of a text mainly depend on the topic, author, style etc. etc.'. It's not true, they mostly depend on the language instead, as I thought I had demonstrated by showing how Italian texts hundreds of years apart, with different topics and literary genre all clustered together for instance on the bigrams statistics. Even the (be honest, quite borderline) text you proposed me (the List of daily Saints of the Catholic church, mostly day and month names, variations of 'saint' and personal names, many non-Italian) turned out to cluster (a moderate distance apart) with the other Italian texts.