From "decryption" to "translation"

[geoffreycaveney]

in most cases, they are ordinary vords with a gallows prepended (that's why my mind keeps wanting to interpret them as pilcrows, but I try not to assume that they are).

Even those that appear to be unique vords after the gallows has been removed are usually common vords if you break them in two.

Yes, and I'm afraid that moving in this direction we may come to what those famous WW2 cryptographers thought it to be - a primitive form of synthetic language (did they say "very primitive"?)

Yes, but you have to be careful about moving *too* far in this direction. I think Rene's first exercise in the "Voynich text generation" thread was very instructive in this regard, even though none of us have been able to decipher it yet. The point is, in attempting to compose his text according to the kinds of typical Voynich patterns that you are discussing here, he actually reduced the conditional entropy of his resulting text far *too* much, down to only about 1.2, whereas the Voynich MS itself in Cuva transcription actually has a conditional entropy of about 2.1. (Typical Latin/Italian/German are slightly over 3, and several examples of natural languages are in the 2.4 to 2.6 range.)