A key to understand the VMS

[Torsten]

Indeed, it is easy to point out that so many of the possible permutations that a writer could make either don't exist or occur so few times that they might be errors.

During writing the VMS the scribe generated a network of 6837 similar word types out of 8026 word types. To argue that he has missed to add the words 6838 and 6839 which you would add to the network is not a valid argument in my eyes. Keep in mind, if you want to add something to the VMS it is necessary to remove something else. Otherwise it would be necessary to add some pages to the VMS.

It is not as easy as you think to call rare words an error. Most times a rare word is similar to other rare words. If you call one word within the network of 6837 similar word types an error you have to answer the following question: Why is only this word an error and not the other 6836 connected word types?

Let's take the word [chedy], which occurs about 501 times (I'm using voynichese.com for the numbers) and should be the centre of a big network of permutations. Let us agree that it has four characters [ch], [e], [d], and [y], which means there are five possible places to insert a new character. Let us further agree that the following 22 characters are part of the Voynich script: [o, y, a, e, ch, sh, k, t, f, p, ckh, cth, cfh, cph, d, s, l, r, m, n, i, q].

I disagree. First 'dy' is used as ligature. In fact the word 'dy' occurs 270 times in the VMS. Therefore 'chedy' has only three elements [ch],[e] and [dy]. 

Secondly, the only possible place to add a new character is at the beginning of a word. Within a word you can only duplicate 'e' and 'i' and you can add a formerly removed glyph.

Thirdly the glyphs are not independent from each other. For instance it is possible to replace similar glyphs [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]. In this way 'Sh' is only another way to write 'ch'. The same is true for the gallows glyphs. Moreover special rules to write certain glyphs at the end or beginning of a word exists. For instance in most cases at the end of a word 'a' is written as 'y'. 

What was the motivation to write glyphs differently at the end or at the beginning of a word? 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', 'k' into 't' or 'e' into 's' [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].