Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[Jorge_Stolfi]

If you take a text in German with umlauts and the standard spelling, and another text  with ue/ae/oe and where "sch" is written "x" and "ie" is "i" and "ch" is "q" or "shh" depending on being hard or soft, you may well conclude that they are more different among themselves than either is to Basque or Armenian or whatever.

I suspect you know this is not really true.

Thanks again for taking the time to run these tests!

I recently posted these two bits of Expert Advice to this forum:

1. Don't waste time computing character-based statistics (character and n-gram frequencies, character entropy, character correlations as function of distance or position, etc.).  Study word statistics instead.
   
2. Never make any claim about statistics of natural languages, no matter how "obviously true", without checking it first. You will often be surprised.
   

So I ignored my own advice #2, and got deservedly burned...  

However, by "Basque" etc I meant some language other than German; not Basque specifically.  (But I wonder -- could we make German look very similar to Dutch or even Basque, according to character and digraph statistics, by a simple but specifically designed "spelling reform"?)

If I read your plots correctly, dist (G1,G1m) was about the same as dist(V2,V3), where G1 is a German text, G1m is the same text with my proposed spelling changes, and V2 and V3 are two Voynichese texts taken from two specific distinct Golf sub-sections.  Which sub-sections are those? 

Moreover dist(G1,G1m) = 0.077 is about 2/3 of dist(V3,V4) = 0.115 where V3 and V4 are taken from a more "typical" pair of Golf sub-sections (the blue dot).   Now 2/3 is less than 1, but not much less.  On the other hand, that 0.115 is a lot less than the typical distance between German and English or Basque samples (~0.30).   

Could then we conclude that the statistical differences between VMS sections, even between Herbal-A and Herbal-B, are more like those caused by a modest spelling/encoding/blabber reform than a change of natural language?

All the best, --stolfi