[split] Does Voynichese evolve from A to B?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So you agree that these spelling changes, which are the specific ones you yourself called out in your immediately preceding post, do constitute tiny changes that could not be the source of the difference?

Those spelling changes I proposed (as an example) are tiny.  

Is your position now A and B must represent different dialects?

My best guess now is that they are either two different dialects or the result of a one-time "spelling reform" of the script.

I can't say which one I think is more likely.  I do not know how this question could be definitively resolved, except by deciphering the text.  

Finding a simple set of systematic re-spelling rules that explains the differences could make "spelling reform" more likely.  But since there are probably also differences of vocabulary due to different topic, style, etc., it will probably be impossible to find a one-to-one mapping of words that preserves word frequencies exactly.  

If the cause is indeed a spelling reform, hopefully we can recover some of the rules, that can account for, say, 80% of the change.  But a dialect change could also manifest itself as a "quasi-systematic spelling change"...

However, while less likely, I cannot exclude the possibility that the cause of the A-B difference is something else, like a change of style or topic.  An English text on chemistry could have significant excess of several otherwise rare digraphs, like "-um", "-ol", and "-ide" endings, "-hl-" and "di-" and "-zo-" etc.  If the text style is telegraphic, these changes could well dominate the digraph frequencies of non-technical language. 

What I don't think possible is that the A-B differences are the result of random drift of the Author's word preferences due to passage of time, or of a series of small spelling adjustments made in reaction to experience in the use of the script.   That is, I don't think that there is a detectable "gradient" in statistics space that is correlated with chronological order.

Even because (as I said before) I don't that "chronological order" is a meaningful concept.  Time of what?

fully different

What does this mean?  Dialect difference is a continuous variable.  One could say that Spanish is a rather extreme dialect of Russian, that diverged from it only recently, less than 7000 years ago...

Be specific and I can test it. I have lots of German in different dialects.

I don't think this exercise would be very informative (your German dialect samples are still spelled with the official German spelling rules, right?)

But, if you insist, here is an example of what could be a modest spelling reform for German:

• split all compound nouns.
  
• split verb prefixes "ge", "be" and spell them as "g@", "b@" (the "@" being a schwa).
  
• replace "v" and "ph" by "f".
  
• then replace "w" by "v".
  
• double a vowel followed an "h" and delete the "h".
  
• double every long vowel ([aeiouäöü]) that is not already doubled.
  
• replace "ie" by "ii".
  
• replace "üü" by "uue", "ää" by "aae", "öö" by "ooe".
  
• replace remaining "ü" by "ue", "ä" by "ae", "ö" by "oe".
  
• replace doubled consonants by single ones.
  
• replace "ß" by "s".
  
• replace all "j" by "i".
  
• replace "tsch" by "tx", "dsch" by "dj", other "sch" by "x".
  
• replace "ch" by "k" if it sounds like "k" (sechs").
  
• replace remaining "ch" by "q" if hard ("nacht") or by "ç" if soft ("ich").
  
• replace "s" by "z" if it sounds like "z" ("sie").
  
• finally replace "b", "d", "z", "v", "g", "j" by "hp", "ht", "hs", "hf", "hk", and "hx", respectively.
  

Or, if you too think that it would be too much work for no gain,

• translate the text into Dutch.
  

(Dutch is just misspelled German, right?    Seen from here, it does look like so...)

All the best, --stolfi