Character-Limited Patterns?

[Emma May Smith]

It's possible to determine the subset of characters which maximizes repeated word sequences, but the right questions would need to be asked.

For example we can expect that a smaller subset will typically result in more repeated sequences, so it would be preferable to ask which subset of n characters yields the most repetition, starting with large n.

There is a trade off between subset size and the number of repeated sequences - the former should not be too small and the latter should not be too large.

It's not clear how the results would be interpreted. I suspect the brute-force search would be the easy part.

Indeed. I expect that whatever the subset used, there must also be some kind of guiding principle behind that selection of characters (or characteristics). For example, we could consider two similar characters (say [k, t]) to be important or unimportant, so long as they were treated the same way. Yet to count one as important and the other unimportant would need explaining beforehand given their similarity. Thus the total number of possible subsets is shrunk to the total number of plausible subsets.

However, as you say, the results would still need interpretation. Were we to measure the patterns of a great deal of subsets it would be hard to choose between them as to which is best and its ultimate meaning. I suppose you could tackle the problem from the other way on, using the measurement to test the principles by which the subset of characters itself was selected.

Though I can foresee that the features which make Voynich words so odd--replaceable letters and rigid character order--would mean that key characters are actually both hugely important semantically and a bar to more word patterning.