What are the characteristics of Labelese?

[nickpelling]

Here's a slightly different view on the labels. Let's just consider the 300 zodiac labels.

None of them are 'very frequent' Voynich words. If we look at the five most frequent words, which I suspect to be:
daiin   chedy   Shedy   chol   aiin

and I count their occurrence in the MS using the table at the bottom of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , then I arrive at 2549 word tokens (apart from counting errors).
The total number of word tokens in the MS is of the order of 38,000 .
This means that 6.4% of all word tokens is one of the above five, but among the labels they don't appear.

If one were to take (arbitrarily) 300 words in the manuscript, then the probability that none of them is one of the above five is 2 * 10^ -9.

This just confirms what we knew: the labels are not standard VMs text, but something different.

Or it confirms that those five common words are not standard VMs text, but are themselves something different. For example, I recently wondered whether chol might (in some way) be the word 'AND': while I proposed back in 2006 that daiin and aiin might be visually concealing Arabic digits. chedy and Shedy the jury is out on, though. ;-)

That is, it may simply be that these five words are not nouns (or abbreviations of nouns) and so have no use in the zodiac's labelese. Just a thought.