What are the characteristics of Labelese?

[Torsten]

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.

Dear René, 

what you write here doesn't fit the description we have given in our paper. We never argued that words are homogenous distributed. On the contrary we wrote "No obvious rule can be deduced which words form the top-frequency tokens at a specific location, since a token dominating one page might be rare or missing on the next one" (Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 3). For instance only daiin is common for the whole manuscript. But even daiin is not homogenous distributed within the VMS (see Timm 2015, p. 25). On page 6 we even use this observation as a counter argument to the language hypothesis (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 6).

Back in 2017 I have already answered a similar argumentation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It seems as if you didn't read the answer: 

For the self-citation method it is something different if you write text or if you write labels. In one case you can copy words from previous lines in the other case you have some distance between text and the place you write. Most of the time you have only previous labels as source words available. Moreover if the labels are arranged in circular form you would probably turn the page while writing the labels. This makes it harder to copy labels which are just up side down. Therefore it is expected that more unique words are used as labels.

In some cases labels have to fill a certain amount of space. In this cases it is not expected that the scribe chooses a word that doesn't fit into the given space. 

chol is typical for Currier A and chedy and Shedy are only frequently used in Currier B. Labels occur mostly in the Pharmaceutical section, the Astronomical section and the Cosmological section. Even if the Pharmaceutical section is counted as Currier A this are just the sections between Currier A and B (see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 6). The pages in Currier B only rarely use labels. Therefore the only place where you can expect a word like chedy as label is the Biological section. And in the Biological section you can find at least a label otol Shedy in <f77v.L.1>.

There are three labels using daiin:
<f67r2.X.6>      tol daiin
<f68v2.R.12>     dchedal daiin
<f72r3.S1.9>     oteey daiin

There is one label using aiin:
<f68v2.R.11>    adairchdy aiin

There are also labels similar to daiin and chol:
<f68r1.S.17>     ordaiin
<f68r2.S.2>      odaiin
<f75r.L.7>       dainy
<f68r2.S.5>      dchol