Writing a fake Voynich by rules: copies, habits and the link between words

[quimqu]

So I changed one thing: the scribe now learns its letter habits seperately for each hand, and for each section within a hand, instead of one table for language A and one for B. With that the curve comes out almost right: ....

I think this observation supports a view of 'punctuated evolution' of the VMS text, which I think is also supported by the recent studies of Layfield & @LisaFaginDavis and @npcompl33t. Some sections are more uniform (ie. Q13 Balneo/Bio), while some others are more varied (and with a recoverable internal 'evolutionary' gradient according to @npcompl33t) but in-between sections the changes are greater.

One more question please: what's the percentage of hapax legomena your model generates? I'm curious because a structure prefix+midfix+suffix does not seem enough to me to account for many of the hapaxes.

Thanks Mauro. That fits what I saw: making the scribe copy from the previous pages (a slow drift) made the curve worse, and what fixed it was separate habits per hand and per section. So the change seems to happen in steps, between hands and sections, more than gradually. I haven’t tested the gradient inside a section yet; that would be the next check.

On hapaxes, over the whole book (scribe: average of 5 runs):

• Hapaxes as a share of distinct words: 71.3% real, 66.1% scribe
  
• As a share of all words: 17.5% vs 15.1%
  
• Distinct words: 7,915 vs 7,365
  

So it’s a bit short, but not far. The scribe doesn’t build words from prefix + midfix + suffix, though. It writes glyph by glyph, each glyph depending on the two before it, within the fixed slot order, and it also edits the words it copies. That’s where the hapaxes come from: about 81% of the scribe’s hapaxes are words that never appear in the manuscript. The small shortfall goes with a bit too much repetition: words that appear exactly twice are 13.8% of distinct words in the scribe and 10.4% in the real text.

[nablator]

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[dashstofsk]

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[Jorge_Stolfi]

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[Mauro]

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[nablator]

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