(20-07-2020, 11:13 PM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe we could say, for now: "Assuming there is no filler text at the ends, and assuming there are no line-end-marker symbols at the ends, VMS vords are probably not broken across lines."
It's a little like saying "Assuming that the earth has not been invaded by CO2-emitting invisible aliens, global warming is caused by humans".
Of course I am exaggerating, I know that the evidence I provided is not conclusive and I may have made errors (while evidence for human-generated global warming is totally solid). I also know that the assumptions you picked are not as far fetched as my invisible aliens. But why only picking those two? One can list numberless ideas that could potentially obfuscate hyphenation. Assuming that Voynichese does not have a rule that only allows hyphenation for hapax-legomena, assuming that the text is not an Alberti cipher, assuming that lines are not to be read bottom-to-top and left-to-right, assuming that the first half of each line reads in the same direction as the second half.... and so on ad infinitum
Yet, in my opinion, speculative ideas do not have the same weight as evidence. RobGea was right in writing "until more evidence comes to light". I know that this point of view is not shared by everybody, e.g. people have written that collecting evidence is quite an effort, so they prefer not to take part in it, yet they are happy to speculate. I respect this point of view, though I believe it makes discussions less constructive.
About the specific ideas you put forward:
Filler text at the end of lines would result in line-end words being longer than the others, and this is not the case: according to Elmar Vogt, they are actually shorter. Also, the idea of statistically relevant filler text is somehow anachronistic, since it appears to have been introduced by Trithemius half a century after the VMS was created. In his application of the method, cipher-text has a TTR (type-token-ratio) close to 1, while (as amply discussed by Koen) the VMS has figures similar to plain-text.
I guess that by "line-end-marker" symbols you mean specific abbreviations, as in the tiny fragments with "etc" you posted. I must say that calling "etc" a "marker" seems misleading to me. As you probably know, I like the idea that EVA:m/g are abbreviations, but I am not aware of this hypothesis resulting in evidence for hyphenation.
Anyway, you could explore this possibility, whatever you mean, and show that this results in defensible figures for hyphenation.
Are vords broken across lines? -- There is no evidence suggesting that they are, while there is some evidence suggesting that they are not.