An explanation of the Voynich Manuscript text

[DonaldFisk]

I think it is well-accepted that the presence of words beginning with a gallows or ending with [m] is caused by line position, rather than their line position being caused by their presence.

Has anyone explained this, or provided any evidence?    Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation.

This would be extremely easy to fake, whether or not the text has meaning.   Just ensure you start a new paragraph when you're about to write a gallows character.

Yes.

1) Words which begin with gallows at the beginning of paragraphs (Grove words) are often unusual in their structure. Removing the gallows makes them more regular. This suggests that the gallows is often added (although I agree that this is not the only cause).

2) If words ending [m] caused the end of a line, we would expect many short lines as words ending [m] occur elsewhere in the text, or even just shorter than average. But such lines typically run the full length of the page with no space for further words. This suggests that it is caused by being the last word in a line.

So what's unusual in their structure?   I only modelled paragraph breaks and line breaks very approximately as an afterthought. I begin new paragraphs on word-initial [p] or [f] only.   I know that isn't accurate ,and sometimes I shouldn't begin them there, and sometimes I should begin new paragraphs with words beggining with other glyphs.

I haven't looked in detail at the occurrence of word final [m] at all, but it's common enough that you can probably choose which [m]s to end the line at, to give the appearance of unbroken text.

I've attacked the problem by considering the VMS's large-scale properties, rather than homing in on specific weirdness, so there are plenty of specific things I haven't examined.   But I find it hard to believe, for example, that the meaning's hidden in the initial paragraph glyphs, or line-final glyphs, and the rest of the text is just filler.

And no one has been able to convince others that they have extracted any meaning from the text, or even identified the language.