Vord length distribution

[MarcoP]

Interesting. The idea that words might be mapped and encoded into some kind of numerical form representation in the VM has also come up before, haven't it?

The best exploration of the subject I am aware of is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In particular, that system results in systematic quasi-reduplication: as far as I know, this is the only encoding of meaningful text that reproduces that particular feature of Voynichese. I don't remember if Rene also commented on word-lengths produced by mod2, but Anton's distribution based on Roman numbers is impressive...

The reason I have given for the possibility of numbers is the positional characteristics of the glyphs. This is not typical of natural language, but is absolutely essential for numbers.

Obviously positional characteristics of glyphs have little to do with languages or numbers and everything  to do with the writing systems used to represent them.
Half of the alphabet we use in our current writing system (upper-case characters) consists of glyphs that are basically constrained to appear in the first position of words (this has been changing recently with the increasing usage of camel-case).
Late medieval writing systems had positional constraints that were closer to Voynichese than the writing system we use now: for instance, in Gothic scripts, characters like 's' and 'r' had different variants that were positionally constrained. Some Latin abbreviation symbols were mostly used for suffixes or prefixes and were basically constrained to appear at the beginning or end of words.

Also, I am not sure that a different positional behaviour of glyphs is essential to writing numbers.
If one considers how we currently write numbers (Indo-Arabic numerals), it is easy to see that glyphs are independent from each other. Differently from our system to write languages and from Roman numbers, there are no preferences for symbols to follow each other. One can say that vowels are often followed and preceded by consonants, for instance 'ne' and 'en' are both frequent in written English. In Roman numbers, 'V' is often followed or preceded by 'I'. But 1, 2, 3 etc have no preference to appear after or before any other digit. Similarly, in the binary system, the various combinations of 0 and 1 (00,01,10,11) occur with basically the same frequency, with the exception that leading zeros only appears when a fixed length is needed for some reason.

Coming back  to the subject of this thread:

What would that mean?

I don't know about the Gaussian distribution, but here is what You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. wrote about his observations:

...the East Asian monosyllabic languages [Chinese, Vietnamese, and Tibetan] *do* have symmetric, binomial-like word length distributions, just like Roman numerals...

Why binomial?

Why should those languages have a binomial-like syllable-length distribution? Well, as observed in the previous page, if you add many random variables with arbitrary distributions, you get a random variable with a binomial-like, bell-shaped distribution, which approaches a Gaussian as you add more and more terms. (Technically, the histogram of the sum of two independent variables is the convolution of their histograms; and the convolution of N arbitrary histograms, as N increases, generally becomes more and more like a Gaussian distribution.)

Now, unlike a polysyllabic word, a single syllable has only a fixed number N of phonetic "slots" (attributes), corresponding to separate muscular controls; and each slot can have a finite number of possible values. In the Chinese syllable, for instance, the initial consonant is one slot, which can have some 20 values including "silent". Another slot would be the glide before the main vowel ("i", "u", or "none", as in "lian", "luan", or "lan"). The main vowel, the secondary glide, the final consonant, and the syllable tone would be the other slots.

In principle, then, a syllable could be written as a sequence of N symbols, each corresponding to one phonetic slot. However, that would be a rather inefficient encoding, because the values of each slot have highly different frequencies in common use. (In particular, the most frequently used words will tend to use slot values that can be articulated with less time or effort.)

For that reason, almost all scripts follow the model of Roman numerals, where one value for each slot is assigned as "default" and not written, while the other values are mapped to distinctive symbols. Thus the "silent" consonant and "none" glides are omitted in pin-yin; the "a" vowel is omitted in Hindu scripts; and the mid level tone of Vietnamese is not marked in Quo^'c Ngu+~. Moreover, if a slot has many possible values, some of them are often encoded by sequences of two or more symbols, such as "ch" in Chinese or "u+" in Vietnamese.

Thus, in all those scripts, the written syllable is the concatenation of N variable-length strings. Assuming that the value of a slot is to some extend independent of other slots, the word-length histogram is therefore the convolution of N slot-length histograms, and therefore is expected to resemble a binomial distribution.