Identifying function words

[Anton]

I'm thinking we could locate the most common form for "and" in a range of languages, European but also some plausible others like Turkic and Arabic. Collect a corpus for each language. Calculate frequency for most common form of "and".

I briefly checked major European languages (modern), and in all of them "and" is at least in top twelve. For some languages, notably for Russian, "and" is most frequent.

Because we don't know if VMS spaces are word boundaries, you also have to calculate how often the "and" word (in any given language) occurs as a syllable.

That will only increase the frequency rank (in the respective language), not decrease it.

If we mess this with the space problem, it will be a nightmare, since instead of top-N vords we'll have to consider top-N Voynichese n-grams (not knowing which value of n to look at specifically).

So I'd suggest to assume beforehand that spaces are spaces.

Actually, let's maybe create a dedicated thread indeed.