Identifying function words

[MarcoP]

How about function words represented by prefixes or suffixes?

If one drops the idea that Voynichese words correspond to words in a natural language, other possibilities open up and this is one of them.
One problem I see is that Voynichese words are not particularly long and (because of the low entropy) plausible affixes are difficult to identify.
For instance, a common function word easily has a frequency of about 2%. A candidate prefix with a similar frequency could be oka-. But we know that a- can only be followed by a very limited number of symbols: so oka- cannot stand for a function word that can occur before a word starting with any symbol.
This subject has been discussed by Emma in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I think that her arguments are solid and could apply many other frequent prefixes / suffixes.

Another thing which recently came to my attention through that stuff of Tranchedino (or whatever his name is) is that one-to-many mapping should not be treated as something impossible.
If one word can be mapped to two or three vords, that completely muddles all our word frequency statistics.

This idea would preserve the assumption that each Voynichese word corresponds to a "source" word. It could also fit my second suggestion:
'the same function words in the "source" language are represented by different words in the different sections'.
Here, one of the problems we face is that Voynichese TTR values are only slightly higher than "normal", while , in this scenario, we would expect a Type-Token-Ratio very close to 1. But if mappings are only switched between sections, TTR would not be affected.

We know that similar Voynichese words tend to behave similarly; similar Voynichese characters also behave similarly (and, in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., similar cipher characters often represent the same source character). But the problem is that a diplomatic cipher easily uses about 100 different symbols, while the Voynich alphabet has about 15/30 symbols: if the two benches are equivalent, the gallows are equivalent etc. we end up with half a dozen symbols.
Finally, we often discussed evidence of the opposite problem: a single Voynichese word that appears to have multiple meanings (homographs). If we must think of a many-to-many mapping from source to cipher words, I am not sure we end up with something manageable.

While I don't think that something like a diplomatic cipher is possible, a nomenclator with different cipher words for each "source" word could partially explain what we observe here. I think this is what nablator meant in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..