Glyph counts between Gallows

[MarcoP]

do the distance between occurrence of any letter in -- say English or Latin -- show the same sort of peak around 3 or 5 with a long tail?  

Hi Michelle,
this is what I get for f,k,p,t in Alice in Wonderland.

The eight Voynich gallows occur in 52% of word tokens, but they occur twice (or more) in only 2% of word tokens (the single gallows is the "core" of Stolfi's word structure). The peak of the distance corresponds to the average length of a Voynichese word.

In English, f,k,p,t occur in 47% of word tokens (close enough to 52%). They occur twice (or more) in 8% of word tokens. These are all consonants, so they are not terribly likely to occur consecutively (though, ignoring spaces, this is frequent enough). I guess that the most frequent distance of 2-3 corresponds to a syllable (including words like 'the'). The spike at distance 0 for 'f' is due to the frequent double 'ff' and even more to the sequence "of the".

I don't think it is possible to have anything like the Voynich distribution in English or in Latin-related languages: what is needed is a set of frequent characters that are constrained not to appear in the same word. Also, Voynichese has fewer very short words than ordinary written languages.