[Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code"

[Torsten]

At least with Linear B pretty much all the experts agreed that it was a syllabary. With Voynichese, we still have not even the outline of a proof as to what constitutes a single token.

This is indeed a interesting question. One of the first steeps in deciphering is to determine the type of the writing system. Normally it would be helpful to count the number of distinguishable glyphs (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Writing systems using fewer than 30 glyphs are usually alphabetic, systems with 50–100 glyphs are likely syllabic, and writing systems with hundreds of glyphs are likely logographic. In the case of the VMs the number of 20-30 different glyphs suggests that the script is alphabetic. 

However, in the case of the VMs nothing is as it seems on first view. For instance, "the word length distribution in the manuscript follows a binomial distribution with an underrepresentation of short and long words, an unusual characteristic in a natural language" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 2). Another unusual result is that "similarly shaped glyphs can replace each other" (Timm 2015, p. 4). So why does the Voynich manuscript looks familiar on first view but behaves unusual and strange on second view?