Stephen, what hit home for me (and I had long suspected but tried not to assume until there was evidence to confirm or at least strongly indicate it) were a number of observations...
• that the spaces might not be what they seem to be (it's one thing to suspect it and another to see that tokens that appear to be visually the same don't relate to one over the length of the manuscript in ways one would expect or in ways that tie together certain sections or certain passages of text with certain diagrams in normal ways),
• if there is meaning, then the lack of expected patterns might strengthen the evidence of it possibly being a verbose code, but if so, it would have to be one that somehow manipulates what we perceive as spaces (and what may not look like spaces might have that function) because otherwise there is still the problem of positionality,
• it might be patterns added one after the other in semi-regular ways according to some plan (but not the way Hyde and Rugg described it) but which 1) either have no linguistic meaning or 2) which depend on interpreting something other than alphabetical letters,
• that the transcripts (including my own, of which I have created four) might not reflect the correct divisions of glyphs or some levels of detail that might have meaning but which are being transcribed in the same way rather than as separate components (I am aware via Nick Pelling that Glen Claston created something like this but I haven't explored it yet because I am still looking into some possible precedents in medieval literature for some of my own research),
• if there IS meaning in the tokens there might be some kind of revolving system so that a specific token of a certain form might not match one of the same form in terms of what it encodes later in the manuscript*, or
• the message might not be in the tokens as per "words", it might be steganographic (which has been mentioned numerous times, but the lack of linguistic-relationship patterns may strengthen the argument that we should be looking at it differently).
*This is the one that seems most likely to yield something potentially linguistic but it is only one of many possibilities and not the easiest one to unsnarl.
I have a few other thoughts, but these were the primary ones that seemed relevant in trying to explain the lack of results that came out of such a long and thorough inquiry.
• that the spaces might not be what they seem to be (it's one thing to suspect it and another to see that tokens that appear to be visually the same don't relate to one over the length of the manuscript in ways one would expect or in ways that tie together certain sections or certain passages of text with certain diagrams in normal ways),
• if there is meaning, then the lack of expected patterns might strengthen the evidence of it possibly being a verbose code, but if so, it would have to be one that somehow manipulates what we perceive as spaces (and what may not look like spaces might have that function) because otherwise there is still the problem of positionality,
• it might be patterns added one after the other in semi-regular ways according to some plan (but not the way Hyde and Rugg described it) but which 1) either have no linguistic meaning or 2) which depend on interpreting something other than alphabetical letters,
• that the transcripts (including my own, of which I have created four) might not reflect the correct divisions of glyphs or some levels of detail that might have meaning but which are being transcribed in the same way rather than as separate components (I am aware via Nick Pelling that Glen Claston created something like this but I haven't explored it yet because I am still looking into some possible precedents in medieval literature for some of my own research),
• if there IS meaning in the tokens there might be some kind of revolving system so that a specific token of a certain form might not match one of the same form in terms of what it encodes later in the manuscript*, or
• the message might not be in the tokens as per "words", it might be steganographic (which has been mentioned numerous times, but the lack of linguistic-relationship patterns may strengthen the argument that we should be looking at it differently).
*This is the one that seems most likely to yield something potentially linguistic but it is only one of many possibilities and not the easiest one to unsnarl.
I have a few other thoughts, but these were the primary ones that seemed relevant in trying to explain the lack of results that came out of such a long and thorough inquiry.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)