Floating gallows

[MarcoP]

Take [cheey], which has 133 tokens in its gallows-less form.  If we limit ourselves to discrete words, we have:

[kcheey] 3 and [tcheey] 6
[cKheey] 10 and [cTheey] 13
[chkeey] 13 and [chteey] 1
[chekey] 5 and [chetey] 4
[cheeky] 21 and [cheety] 3
*[cheeyk] 0 and *[cheeyt] 0

The only place in [cheey] where we never find a gallows inserted to form a discrete word is at the very end.

But we do find the hapax legomena [cheeykam] and [cheeytal] -- which is what we might expect if the insertion of a gallows had filled in a space in [cheey.am] and [cheey.al].  We also find:

[cheey.k*] 6 and [cheey.t*] 4
[cheey,k*] 4 and [cheey,t*] 1

-- in which a following gallows has been attached in transcription to the next word, with fully half (5/10) of such cases being flagged as ambiguous (with comma breaks).  Maybe these latter cases look like nablator's examples.

All of which could be taken to suggest that these various words [kcheey], [cKheey], [chkeey], and so forth might be better analyzed as a consistent [cheey] with a gallows inserted at different points (or "floating" from place to place?) than in terms of a word morphology built around [k] or [t] occupying a consistent "core"-type slot.

Hi Patrick, the chkeey list of variants is impressive. I think it's worth adding that Stolfi's grammar discusses a "core" gallows preceded and followed by "mantles" made of e-sequences and benches, so the different positions of k in the variants of chkeey are accepted by his model (but 'cheeyk' is accepted as well). Also, his grammar predicts that this kind of movement is basically impossible in the case of mantle-less words like 'qokaiin' or 'otaldy'.
Stolfi's grammar is certainly perfectible (e.g. it allows much movement for the gallows in 'olkar') and reading word-spaces in the ms is often unclear, but I think that the concept of Voynichese words, however problematic, is quite useful. Your system where you remove all spaces and re-introduce them on the basis of a set of rules seems like a possible way out from the difficulty of transliterating spaces.