A Quantitative Confirmation of the Currier Language Distinction

TL;DR

This paper quantitatively confirms the Currier A/B language distinction in the Voynich Manuscript using statistical models, revealing it as a projection of a higher-dimensional system governed by a folio-level boolean switch.

Contribution

It provides the first statistical validation of the Currier A/B distinction and models it as a low-resolution projection of a complex generative system.

Findings

Beta-Binomial model predicts folio labels with 89% accuracy.

A two-state binomial model explains the A/B contrast better than a single-state model.

Word templates account for 92% of the variance in the switch behavior.

Abstract

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.