previous Basque theories of the Voynich ms?

[geoffreycaveney]

Therefore it is necessary to find what all words, what all lines, what all paragraphs and what all folios in the VMS have in common. 

Most interestingly, there appears to exist an inherent relation between word similarity and context: when we look at the three most frequent words on each page, for more than half of the pages two of three will differ in only one detail (Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 3). There is no doubt that this relation exists. René Zandbergen has tried to deny this observation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. times. But every time René tries to find a counter example he only provides additional You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that words in the VMS are indeed related to similar ones.

I know that at some stage of earlier research into the Voynich ms, perhaps decades ago, a researcher raised the idea that possibly only certain parts, perhaps small parts, of the ms have actual meaningful content, and the remaining pages of the ms comprise meaningless repetition of some of the words that are found in the meaningful parts. This could have happened if a person who did not know the meaning of the script/language began by copying the meaningful parts from some other original source, and then in a flight of fancy added his own meaningless parts using the same script and some of the words that he had seen, but without understanding their meaning or grammar. I would suggest the Herbal section except for the first introductory page as a strong candidate for a possibly meaningless part of the ms in this scenario, and perhaps the Pharmaceutical section as well. The writing would have served simply as a kind of decoration to accompany the illustrations.

If this is the case, then in our statistical analysis we would have to consider the possibility that the ms is a combination of meaningful and meaningless parts, and we may not know which ones are which. For example, perhaps those "more than half of the pages" where two of the three most frequent words differ in only one detail, are primarily among the meaningless parts of the ms. But the remaining pages, which do not possess this property you identify, may include the meaningful parts of the ms. This is only a general hypothesis, but I submit that such possibilities must be considered and taken into account. We cannot simply presume that the whole entire ms is a monolith and a unitary composition. Of course we know about Dialect A and Dialect B, but each of these "Dialects" could include both meaningful and meaningless parts, with the copier repeating some of the words from the meaningful Dialect A pages in his writing of the meaningless Dialect A pages, and likewise repeating some of the words from the meaningful Dialect B pages in his writing of the meaningless Dialect B pages.

Torsten, could you post a list of exactly which pages of the ms do and do not possess the "two of the three most frequent words differ in only one detail" property?