A key to understand the VMS

[nickpelling]

Torsten: the network of Voynichese words exists after the fact, not before it - its existence is not enough to prove anything useful by itself. No 15th century person could remotely have sat down and said "I'm going to create a dense network of words that follows a cleverly-thought-out set of transition rules".

And your suggestion that the network probably came from a smaller (but now lost) network of words built up as "some drafts" by the same scribe is nothing short of saying that your chicken came from a marginally smaller chicken (and not via an egg).

As far as eol goes, you don't seem to understand my point at all: you describe some transitions as being somehow preferential (e.g. air to ail) whereas others are much weaker (e.g. al to ail), but given that both have the same abstract edit distance yet greatly different statistics, to claim that it must be the network itself that drives these preferences is a pure post hoc argument.

What is actually going on under Voynichese's hood is that a highly varied set of adjacency and writing rules - some combinative (e.g. al/ol/ar/or), some generative (e.g. av, aiv, aiiv, aiiiv), some fixed (e.g. qo, dy), some outright mysterious (e.g. Neal Keys), plus others we don't even have names for yet - is in play. These rules all work together to implicitly create the network you've worked so hard to document, in ways that we only glimpse via statistics.

And so what I find most frustrating about your papers is that the study you have done on the statistics would be hugely informative and useful, were you not investing so much effort into linking them to a network-centric autocopying view of the manuscript which doesn't work as well as you think, and which - even if it were true, which it isn't - would only be sufficient to explain 10% of Voynichese's behaviours, and then only after the fact.