At 15:20, the Ardic video says something I don't remember hearing before. If I understand correctly, the idea is that the text is an acrostic. It sounds like an interesting explanation for line-initial LAAFU effects and it has the merit of being compatible with XV century culture.
Of course, without knowing more details, it is impossible to say much, but I tried a simple test anyway. I collected the initial characters of paragraph lines in all pages (considering benches ch/sh as individual characters) and checked for the presence of whole Voynichese words. The "acrostic" text has as many characters as paragraph lines in the VMS: more than 5000. Among the more than 1900 word types that occur at least twice in the text, only 19 are matched in the "acrostic" text (1%).
As a more "qualitative" check, one can compare the alternation pattern circle[oay]/non-circle, that according to Jacques Guy's Sukhotin-based analysis could be suggestive of the phonetic alternation between vowels and consonants. These are the patterns for [oay] vs all other characters in the acrostic (top) and text (bottom); first 15 pages/lines of Quire 20.
In my opinion, the patterns in the acrostic appear to be rather random, with circles repeating up to three times consecutively (e.g. 'oyy' in 103v) and long non-circle sequences (e.g 107v kdsdtptpsshtq). I think that the occurrences of alternation (e.g. 104r podokydoy) are compatible with a random distribution. This appears to be quite different from the behaviour of the actual text.
Of course, without knowing more details, it is impossible to say much, but I tried a simple test anyway. I collected the initial characters of paragraph lines in all pages (considering benches ch/sh as individual characters) and checked for the presence of whole Voynichese words. The "acrostic" text has as many characters as paragraph lines in the VMS: more than 5000. Among the more than 1900 word types that occur at least twice in the text, only 19 are matched in the "acrostic" text (1%).
As a more "qualitative" check, one can compare the alternation pattern circle[oay]/non-circle, that according to Jacques Guy's Sukhotin-based analysis could be suggestive of the phonetic alternation between vowels and consonants. These are the patterns for [oay] vs all other characters in the acrostic (top) and text (bottom); first 15 pages/lines of Quire 20.
In my opinion, the patterns in the acrostic appear to be rather random, with circles repeating up to three times consecutively (e.g. 'oyy' in 103v) and long non-circle sequences (e.g 107v kdsdtptpsshtq). I think that the occurrences of alternation (e.g. 104r podokydoy) are compatible with a random distribution. This appears to be quite different from the behaviour of the actual text.