A mathematical approach to double words, conditional logic and the missing pages

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Typology of Triggered Doublets: I verified what is being duplicated. The absolute most frequent doublet in the entire manuscript is daiin daiin. However, when qoteedy is present, the daiin daiin doublet is almost totally suppressed. In its place, the trigger forces the duplication of very different words or, frequently, of isolated bigrams like ol ol and ar ar. (Considering the hypothesis that 'ol' and 'ar' may represent counting sequences, this could imply an "operative" function for these words, though I do not want to go too far into interpretations).

This is an important point.  Consider the possibility that Voynichese is a natural language with some encoding that maps each distinct word type to the same distinct word type (or word type tuple, e.g. by splitting the word into syllables or morphemes).  Then a "doublet" is not an interesting category for analysis.  Imagine analyzing the text of an English newspaper by looking at words that have trigraph doublets, of the form xABCABCy.  You may get some intriguing results -- like "trigraph doublets occur in only 1% of the pages, but they occur in 90% of the pages where the words 'voice' or 'river' occurs" -- but it would be very hard to figure out what is going on.  Because you would be studying the distributions of "Mississippi" and "chiuhaua" and "singing" and "alfalfa" etc. added together.  

Thus I think you should 

• focus on specific doublets, like "daiin daiin", rather than "doublets" in general
  
• analyze only one homogeneous section at a time, like Herbal-A or Bio
  
• use a more natural geographic unit than page
  
• study distribution within the units besides across units
  

About the last two points: in the Herbal section, for example, the natural unit is probably the paragraph, not the page -- because the paragraphs are expected to be largely independent but with non-trivial internal correlations; and we expect that the probability occurrence of certain words and phrases will vary depending on position along the paragraph. 

For the Bio section, on the other hand, a more natural unit may be a group of a fixed number k of consecutive tokens.  Or even not use presence/absence in a unit but instead measure word-word correlation as a function of distance, measured in tokens.
 
All the best, --stolfi