[split] recurring word sequences

[MarcoP]

That is the kind of work I enjoy doing.  My main focus of research is the Zodiac ciphers and I spent a lot of time generating statistics, often by randomizing a ciphertext and using the randomizations to estimate significance of certain observations (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).  My curiosities around Voynich follow a similar pattern of thinking about how the various qualities of Voynichese compare to randomizations of the text.  The "phobia" of 3- and 4- word sequence repetitions seems very significant because I would expect shuffles of the text to produce many more than are observed.  It would also be very interesting to me to see if the 3- or 4- word repetitions are actually happening over certain distances (i.e., a pattern of words such as ABC might not repeat, but a pattern such as A??BC might, where "?" is a wildcard representing any other Voynich word).

I hope you will stick with the Voynich community: the ms is a true mine of curious patterns and people willing to help us dig are always welcome!

From the very limited comparisons I have examined, I wouldn't say there is a phobia for 3- and 4- word sequences. In particular, repeating 3-word sequences are about as frequent as in Pliny.
A factor that is difficult to evaluate is spelling variation (see Stephan Bax' discussion You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Medieval scribes were often inconsistent in their spelling, in particular when using abbreviations, but not only. On the other hand, the comparison texts I used have been carefully transcribed, reviewed and corrected through the centuries. Factors like these clearly interfere with  the exact repetition of sentences.

I also included a simple experiment with  a "scrambled" version of Voynich Quire 13, in which I arbitrarily shuffled words. Random word order provides a much lower number of repeating sentences (only 10 3-word sequences, vs 49 in the unmodified Quire13).