Usefulness of categorizing words based on occurances in different parts of the MS?

[joben]

Joben, there are certain patterns in how information is presented in medieval herbal manuscripts. Most of them follow four or five "formulas" for presentation.

By creating a concordance of all the token-relationships in the VMS, I hoped to flush out whether there were patterns and what they were.

The result was not what one would expect if the VMS were a substitution cipher (which is how most people interpret it).


So... 1) assuming the text is meaningful, and 2) assuming the text is related to the images, there have to be other dynamics going on and VMS "words" are probably not words in the linguistic sense. If they were, these patterns would have been discernible.

The VMS text is positional. Certain things are always at the beginning, some always in the middle, some usually at the end. The letter frequencies in specific parts of tokens are not normal for natural languages.

The text has been manipulated in some way, so... taking it at face value doesn't work (it would have been long since decoded if this were a simple substitution cipher). I think it is unwise to assume that VMS tokens are words (in the linguistic sense).

Thanks for taking your time explaining. I understand that you have gone through a lot of effort and I will dig deeper into the observations that you have described here. I need to get a better understanding of what voynichese is and isn't before I try to draw conclusions on my own. I feel like there is a lot to learn.