Discussion of "A possible generating algorithm of the Voynich manuscript"

[Torsten]

I will first comment your second argument. I interpret it as a suggestion that initial-initial repetition and/or final-final repetition can cause a bias in the distribution of word-break combinations. 

My point is that initial-initial repetition, final-final repetition, and word-break combinations have the same cause. The cause is that words co-occur with similar ones. This means that word-break combinations are just another samples of local repetition.

Turning to your first argument, if I understand correctly what you write, it appears to be more in agreement with the observations: the word after -y is modified or selected in such a way that it starts with q-. I understand your statement that "The shape of <q> is quite similar to the shape of <y>" as your explanation for why q- appears to be systematically chosen to be written immediately after -y. Graphical similarity is somehow subjective. One can also say that <y> looks like <o>, but the word-break combination -y.o- is slightly dis-preferred (i.e. occurs less often than expected).

Similarly, -o.y- is dis-preferred. Moreover, all the immediate repetitions of the same character across words are dis-preferred (in various degrees): if the idea were having similar characters across word-breaks, -y.y- could have been an option.

A general principle of the self-citation method is to copy glyph sequences and to avoid obvious repetitions by replacing glyphs with similar ones (see Timm 2015, p. 5). To repeat the same glyph, token, or modification rule too often would result in obvious repetitions and would therefore violate this general principle. Moreover as demonstrated in your paper the distribution of word-break combinations is not consistent for the whole VMS. This suggests that we speak about rules that were developed and/or modified during writing the VMS. I didn't see any need to apply the same modification rule for every glyph. In fact it is possible that the scribe developed individual rules for certain glyphs and it is also possible that this rules gets modified within the text.

If one examines word-break preferences in their entirety, it is possible to point out a different explanation that applies to a large part of the observations.

Our goal was to examine the key properties for the whole VMS-text (see chapter 2 in Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 2ff). Word-break preference are just one element within the whole VMS-text. In my eyes it is therefore not helpful to focus solely on word-break preferences.