A key to understand the VMS

[Sam G]

In Vietnamese it is indeed possible to build a network of similar words. This is the case since many smaller networks build a larger network. The reason for this is that Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language and is using tone to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. Therefore many short words are used. Ok, a large network of similar words is not an unique feature for the VMS.

Well, there you go. My main point is that statements of the form "no language has such-and-such property" need to actually be checked against a wide variety of languages.

But did this mean that we should assume that the text of the VMS represents a monosyllabic language? One feature that doesn't seam to fit is the existence of composed word types like 'olchedy' beside words like 'ol' and 'chedy'. BTW: Also the Vietnamese text contains repeated phrases like 'người đàn'. A feature that is missing for the VMS.

I agree that it's not the same in every respect. The main similarity is the rigid phonotactic structure which allows the smaller words to be connected into a network.

In Mandarin Chinese, the two-syllable words are disconnected from the one-syllable word network because there are no words of intermediate length to bridge the gap between the two sets of words.

But some languages with rigid phonotactic structures do have such intermediate length words. Many languages of mainland Southeast Asia have words that are "sesquisyllabic", or "one and a half syllables".

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To oversimplify a bit, in order to form a network in Mandarin Chinese you would need to be able to go from words with a CV structure to words with a CVCV structure, which obviously can't be done with an edit distance of 1. But in some languages you can go CV --> CCV --> CVCV.

This might not be exactly the same as Voynichese either but I think it's another step closer.