sh_ and ch_ compose the same words

[nickpelling]

Probably unsurprisingly, I too have an interest in the question of ch vs sh: but at the same time I have a deep mistrust of low-level interpretations that first require Voynichese 'words' to be literally words (i.e. that they must necessarily follow an explicitly language-like grammar) - this seems to me to be something we should be testing rather than assuming.

As such, I prefer to look (as do cryptologists in general) to contact tables between tokens, with the inevitable Voynichological proviso there being that we don't yet know what Voynichese glyphs comprise tokens. All the same, looking at token adjacency generally gives us larger (and as a consequence, probably more statistically reliable) instance counts to work with.

It's well known that chor (and shor to a large extent) are much more common in A pages than B pages:

• chor A = chor B x 4.82
  
• shor A = shor B x 2.44
  

Contrarywise, che and she are much more common in B pages than A pages:

• che B = che A x 3.97
  
• she B = she A x 4.90
  

What isn't so well known (I think) is that chd and shd are vastly more common in B pages:

• chd B = chd A x 20.74
  
• shd B = shd A x 23.14
  

Of the 726 chd in B pages, 504 are chdy: and of the 162 shd in B pages, 100 are shdy.

My conclusion is that even though ch and sh have broadly similar ratios in A and B...

• ch A = ch B x 2.82
  
• sh A = sh B x 2.18
  

...the ways that ch and sh touch following tokens seem to have widely different distributions in A and B, and I think this is almost entirely incompatible with the suggestion that ch and sh are essentially expressing the same thing.

PS: it's also not widely mentioned that shch and chsh are equally abhorred in both A and B (shch A = 6, chsh A = 4, shch B = 6, chsh B = 5), a strongly consistent behaviour that is surely next to impossible for any kind of edit distance 'algorithm' to yield.

*ducks under table waiting for the almost inevitable barrage of edit distance spam to pass*