Heap's Law

[Torsten]

Torsten - this is certainly apparently true. However, I feel that your theory, which otherwise appears to account for much of the way the text was written, fails to explain the grammatical structure which appears to constrain Voynichese (see Stolfi's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.paradigm). What exactly are these structures, and why do they apply throughout the manuscript? Because if you could link those structures into your generation algorithm, we would be some way closed towards proving your theory. And why was the text created in such a way that unique words appear to be introduced in a topic like way? (OK, I don't expect you to prove that second question!   )

> What exactly are these structures.

Normally the structure of a word is not change while copying it. Therefore copied words share the same structure.

See for instance page f10r. On page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you can find beside 3 x 'chor' also 3 x 'shor' and 4 x 'chol'  (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The difference between 'ch' into 'sh' is one additional stroke and the difference between 'ol' into 'or' is a different shape of the last glyph. But this type of changes didn't affect the word structure.

Beside the word 'chor' also the words 'qokchor' and 'oykchor' exists and beside of 'chol' the words 'qokchol' and 'qokchol'. Also an additional "prefix" didn't affect the word sequence.
(see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

For 'qokchor' and 'oykchor' the structure of 'qok' has changed. In 'oyk-' the 'o'-glyph is used as first sign. This type of changes is very rare. There are only three instances of 'oyk-' but over 3100 instances of 'qok-'. Note: The connection between 'oyk-' and 'qok-' is confirmed by three instances of 'qoyk-'.

> , and why do they apply throughout the manuscript.

What happens if a word with a different structure is generated? In the case of 'oyk-' the new structure is not copied and 'oyk-' looks weird to us. 

But what happens if the new structure is copied over and over again? In this case we would accept the new structure as a rule for the VMS. See for instance words like 'cheody' and 'sheody' in Currier A. On page f65v beside 'sheody' also one instance of 'chedy' exists (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It is the only instance of 'chedy' on a page using Currier A. This switch from 'eod' to 'ed' is very interesting. Words using 'ed' are typical for Currier B but rarely used in Currier A. 'chedy' is the third most frequent word in the VMS. But if we would only know pages in Currier A a word like 'chedy' would look weird to us. 

> And why was the text created in such a way that unique words appear to be introduced in a topic like way?

They are not introduced in a topic like way. We only use the topics to split the manuscript into sections. Herbal pages in Currier A and herbal pages in Currier B are using different word sets and share the same topic. 

The main difference between Currier A and Currier B is the usage of 'ed'. Therefore we can use words like 'chedy' to reconstruct the original order for the sections:

                   "chedy" "qokeedy"
Herbal in Currier A      1        0
Pharmaceutical (A)       1        0
Astronomical             4        0
Cosmological            24        4
Herbal in Currier B     62        9
Stars (B)              190      137
Biological (B)         210      153