What are labels?

[Anton]

I think the default assumption for "isolated" vords should be that they are nouns.

That's of course the most natural default assumption, but it immediately meets difficulties. For example, consider "otol". Let me quote myself (figure omitted):

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3. The mysterious star of "otol"

The diagram in f68r1 contains the star labeled as otol. It is the rightmost star in the diagram, and it is the most frequently mentioned star in the whole VMS (see Section 6 below). What is more interesting, we meet otol in some remarkable contexts throughout the VMS.

First, we meet it as early as in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. - and not in the regular flow of the text (which would be nothing more than just statistically common for an "important" star frequently referred to), but in the righ-margin-aligned text block in line 18 (the last line of paragraph 3), which reads otol daiiin. The word "daiiin" occurs 18 times in the VMS, but in no case except You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. it is preceded by a star name.

We do not know what is the designation of these right-aligned patterns. They have been proposed to represent section titles (the section description being subject of paragraphs of f1r, thus You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. serving as a "table of contents"). Another possibility is that they represent page numbers in the table of contents. Within the framework of the "section title" hypothesis, a star name used in the generalized decription (which section titles would usually be) deserves attention. What word could be used as a star name and, at the same time, as some generalization? The Arabic "Kochab" (which literally means "star") comes to mind; are there any other options?!

Moving to f55r, we find, in the last line of that folio, another remarkable phrase: ockhy daiin otol, where ockhy is another Voynich star. So we have two star names separated by daiin. Of course, we do not know whether some punctuation mark is not supposed here in between.
otol is not uncommon in astrological folios: beside f68r, it is twice encountered in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (right page), then in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left page), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (central and right pages). It is introduced several times in the Zodiac pages, among those in the "grey Aries" page in "otol ypsharal" - the label for the star held by one of the persons.

So far we considered only exact matches, but there are also some "star labels" in the Zodiac pages beginning with "otol": like otolaiin in grey Aries or otolchd, otolchey and otoloaram in white Aries; also there are some "person labels" beginning with "otol": like otolam in Gemini or otoly in Scorpio. In addition, two star names in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. also begin with otol - that is, otolchedy and otolchcthy.

Back to exact matches, we find even more striking appearances of otol - in the visual contexts seemingly unrelated to the star topics. See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Appearances of "otol" in unexpected visual contexts: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (left), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (centre), You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (right)

So otol appears to be a widely used notion, suitable for the following applications:

• serving as the name of some quite important celestial object;
  
• possibly also serving as morphological part of other star names;
  
• possibly serving for a certain generalization;
  
• serving for description (direct or by means of association) of a number of unidentified objects: anatomic/distillation (?), leaf/root of some plant (?);
  
• possibly serving as morphological part of description (direct or by means of association) of "personified" objects in the Zodiac pages.
  

What celestial body (Sun and Moon excluded) in what language could serve so many purposes at once?

Finding one manuscript where that is the case does not mean the probability overall that a label is an adjective is not very small.

Given that the VMS is in itself a work which is by no means commonplace, I would shun conclusions derived from commonplaсe analogies.