A key to understand the VMS

[Torsten]

2. My knowledge of different language falls short here, but there are languages other than Indo-European ones which approach the relevant statistics of Voynichese to a much greater extent.

Hello Koen,

 one key feature of language are repetitive phrases. They did not exist for the VMS (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

3. And many of these similar words are very frequent as well, like he, she, we.

My statement was that as more frequent a word is as more similar words exists for it. Your statement that similar words also exists in languages is a different statement. 

4. They may be lists of dialectal variations of plant names, for example, or names in related languages.

My statement was for the whole manuscript  (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was only an example.

5. Someone defending the natural language hypothesis might say that they are literally different languages or different dialects of the same language.

Between two languages or dialects I would expect a break and not a smooth development from one language to the other (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

6. This is again a problem in and of itself. It must be taken into account by all theories.

For the autocopying hypotheses such a feature is expected. For the line on a page there is no previous line to copy from. Therefore it is necessary to use another page as source. The source word for the first word in each line could only be found within the previous lines. Since the first and the last word in each line are easy to spot, the most obvious way is to pick them as a source for the generation of a word at the beginning or at the end of a line. Therefore features occurring at the end or at the beginning of a line are copied more often.

Moreover, it is to be expected that the scribe would run out of space at the end of a line. Therefore it would be no surprise if sometimes the last letters in a line were squeezed into the available space. However, there are no such crowded places in the VMS. If the scribe was able to select words which fitted into the available space such a feature is no surprise anymore.

7. And there's often repetition, for example to express plurals.

My statement was about unique words and not about repetition.

8. We're not as certain about the lack of corrections as we once were.

Indeed some later changes exists. What I mean is the lack of places where something was deleted. 

If your intention is to hide that only similar words are copied all the time, it is a mistake to repeat something. The easiest way to remove something repeated is to change it. One feature of the script used for the VMS is that in many cases one additional quill stroke is enough to change a glyph into another one. For instance, it would easily be possible to change "ch" into "Sh" or "e" into "s". (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)