[split] The Zipf law and the Voynich Manuscript

[Torsten]

In the case of the Cardan grille and the auto-copying hypothesis, it is not immediately clear why the Zipf law would be obeyed, but it is conceivable. However, what is not explained is that it appears in the main text but not in the labels.
It would require a dedicated effort by the author to 'do something different'.

For the auto-copying method it is something different if you write text or if you write labels. In one case  you can copy words from previous lines in the other case you have some distance between text and the place you write. Most of the time you have only previous labels as source words available. Moreover if the labels are arranged in circular form you would probably turn the page while write the labels. This makes it harder to copy labels which are just up side down. Therefore it is expected for the auto-copying hypotheses that more unique words are used as labels.

One can safely exclude the possibility that the author understood the Zipf law and deliberately broke it for the labels.

Agreed.

Another interesting property of the label words (and I concentrate on the zodiac and pharma labels - I have barely looked at the others) is that they do largely occur in the main text (thanks to Marco for confirming this), but do not include some of the most frequent words. No label (from memory) just says chol , daiin  or chedy. This is also a 'good sign' for the meaningful text scenario. The running text is likely to include words like articles, prepositions and verbs that are less likely candidates as labels.

Why do you pick [chol], [daiin] and [chedy]? Only [daiin] is common for the whole manuscript. [chol] is typical for Currier A and [chedy] is only frequently used in Currier B. But labels occur mostly in the Pharmaceutical section, the Astronomical section and the Cosmological section. Even if the Pharmaceutical section is counted as Currier A this are just the sections between Currier A and B. The pages in Currier B only rarely use labels. Therefore the only place where you can expect a word like [chedy] used as label is the Biological section. And in the Biological section you can find at least a label [otol shedy] in <f77v.L.1>.

There are  three labels using [daiin]:
<f67r2.X.6>      tol.daiin=
<f68v2.R.12>     dchedal.daiin=
<f72r3.S1.9>     oteey.daiin=

There are also labels similar to [daiin] [chol] and [chedy]:
<f68r1.S.17>     ordaiin=
<f68r2.S.2>      odaiin=
<f75r.L.7>       dainy=

<f68r2.S.5>      dchol=