The "gallows" characters

[-Job-]

It's worth looking at some numbers for character substitutions in different languages.

The following gives the percentage of words that are still valid after a character substitution, in some texts of roughly equivalent lengths.

For example, starting with Pliny:

Pliny - Natural History (Latin):
m replaced by s: 213/3074 7.0%
o replaced by i: 226/3634 6.0%

In Pliny's vocabulary, if we take a word containing an "m" and replace it with an "s", we get a valid word 7% of the time. There are other valid substitutions but they yield less than 5% - i'm only listing the most significant ones.

Bible (Latin):
m replaced by s: 136/1887 7.0%
o replaced by i: 107/1828 6.0%

Very much in line with Pliny above.

Dante - Divine Comedy (Italian):
a replaced by e: 348/4187 8.0%
a replaced by o: 377/4187 9.0%
e replaced by a: 320/4046 8.0%
i replaced by e: 318/3789 8.0%
o replaced by a: 383/3521 11.0%
z replaced by t: 21/220 10.0%

Vowels with vowels and consonants with consonants, as Emma noted.

Melville - Moby Dick (English):
j replaced by b: 12/149 8.0%
j replaced by p: 15/149 10.0%
j replaced by r: 11/149 7.0%
j replaced by s: 14/149 9.0%
w replaced by t: 71/955 7.0%
z replaced by d: 9/127 7.0%

Bible (Hebrew):

<kaf> replaced by <he>: 68/274 25.0%
<kaf> replaced by <vav>: 80/274 29.0%
<kaf> replaced by <yod>: 47/274 17.0%
<kaf> replaced by <mem>: 50/274 18.0%

Hebrew has the highest values by far...

Voynich Manuscript - A Folios:
f replaced by d: 35/132 27.0%
f replaced by k: 54/132 41.0%
f replaced by p: 45/132 34.0%
f replaced by t: 55/132 42.0%
k replaced by t: 310/992 31.0%
m replaced by l: 89/200 45.0%
m replaced by r: 99/200 50.0%
p replaced by k: 119/303 39.0%
p replaced by t: 118/303 39.0%
r replaced by l: 239/777 31.0%
t replaced by k: 310/833 37.0%

Voynich Manuscript - B Folios:
f replaced by k: 90/223 40.0%
f replaced by p: 67/223 30.0%
f replaced by t: 83/223 37.0%
k replaced by t: 428/1566 27.0%
m replaced by l: 113/241 47.0%
m replaced by r: 118/241 49.0%
p replaced by k: 177/574 31.0%
p replaced by t: 184/574 32.0%
r replaced by l: 380/1208 31.0%
s replaced by c: 376/1313 29.0%
t replaced by k: 426/1017 42.0%

...but the Voynich is even higher.

Given that the glyphs for "m" and "r" are so similar, it's possible that some of these pairs represent the same character.

In any case, if they are in fact different characters, we can at least rule out some vowel/consonant assignments.

You can see the distribution for valid (green) and invalid (red) words for these assignments here:
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For example:
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