Whenever I am analyzing the VMS text, I start with objective facts and then try to figure out the paradigm they fit into. Here is a fact about the placement of "aiin" and "ain":
<aiin> and <ain> appear word-initial over 500 times but are never once line-initial.
To me, this is an argument against the following theories:
<aiin> and <ain> appear word-initial over 500 times but are never once line-initial.
To me, this is an argument against the following theories:
- The Autocopying hypothesis: If the VMS scribe was just manufacturing text through autocopying, why is there this very strict rule about never placing <aiin> at the beginning of a line - especially when <aiin> can be the beginning of a word (or a standalone word) in at least five hundred other instances? Wouldn't we expect at least one occurrence of <aiin> beginning a line, instead of 500-to-0?
- The "Natural language" hypothesis: if Voynich is a natural language written in an unknown script, it would be odd that certain words can be found anywhere else in a paragraph but never at the beginning of a line of text (*note, I didn't say "beginning of a sentence")