geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

There are strong points against any language simple substitution theory, and they have been constantly raised for I don't know how long.

One fresh observation is that certain vords (or maybe lines) appear as if sorted. For example, I You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. first six quires (haven't yet got enough time to continue) of the MS, looking at the paragraphs beginning with k. Now, 91% of these paragraphs have their first three lines "sorted" by the first letter - that is, the sequence of line-initial glyphs complies to the deterministic ordered set.

Anton,
The points you raise in the linked "Regaining the lost order" thread, and in the several additional threads linked in your initial post there, are certainly important to consider and investigate, as you and others have done and are doing. However, it appears that the main focus of these ideas concerns the order, sorting, re-sorting, etc., of the existing vords and lines. But David Jackson made a very valid and critical point in that thread:

But even if you did this, you wouldn't alter the statistics of the individual words, and nobody has been able to break down the words.

Every point I made in my initial post here concerns the internal structure of individual vords in the ms text, not the order or sorting of the vords or the lines. You can reorder and re-sort the vords and lines in any way that you like, and it will not change a thing about the issue of the extremely restricted set of distinct final units of Voynich vords, the vast majority of which end only in EVA [y], [n], [l], or [r]. No matter how these existing vords and lines are reordered, re-sorted, and rearranged, they will still have these same final units. And it will still be quite difficult to account for the necessary occurrence of an actual language's words that end with, for example, "s", "r", and "n". I have pointed out how this will be a particular problem for any Germanic language, but such issues will also apply to just about any reasonable candidate language for the text of the Voynich ms.