A Quantitative Confirmation of the Currier Language Distinction
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arXiv
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866914530300264448 |
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| author | Parisel, Christophe |
| author_facet | Parisel, Christophe |
| contents | We present a unified quantitative analysis of the Currier A/B language distinction in the Voynich Manuscript, proceeding in two stages.
First, we confirm that the distinction is genuine: a Beta-Binomial mixture model applied to character-pair substitution ratios across 185 folios, without access to Currier's labels, selects 2 by BIC and predicts held-out folio labels at 89% accuracy.
Second, we show that the A/B contrast is not primitive but is a low-resolution projection of a higher-dimensional generative system. Its dominant component is a discrete boolean "switch" set once per folio, governing the vowel following the digraphs ch and sh. A two-state binomial mixture achieves Delta\ AIC = 2,549 over a single-state model and assigns 195 of 197 folios unambiguously. This switch does not operate uniformly: word templates divide into fixed contexts and switchable contexts, with template identity accounting for 92% of variance. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_25979 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A Quantitative Confirmation of the Currier Language Distinction Parisel, Christophe Cryptography and Security Computation and Language We present a unified quantitative analysis of the Currier A/B language distinction in the Voynich Manuscript, proceeding in two stages. First, we confirm that the distinction is genuine: a Beta-Binomial mixture model applied to character-pair substitution ratios across 185 folios, without access to Currier's labels, selects 2 by BIC and predicts held-out folio labels at 89% accuracy. Second, we show that the A/B contrast is not primitive but is a low-resolution projection of a higher-dimensional generative system. Its dominant component is a discrete boolean "switch" set once per folio, governing the vowel following the digraphs ch and sh. A two-state binomial mixture achieves Delta\ AIC = 2,549 over a single-state model and assigns 195 of 197 folios unambiguously. This switch does not operate uniformly: word templates divide into fixed contexts and switchable contexts, with template identity accounting for 92% of variance. |
| title | A Quantitative Confirmation of the Currier Language Distinction |
| topic | Cryptography and Security Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.25979 |