Floating gallows

[MichelleL11]

Because of the random choice of space insertion in transliterations, most statistics on words are unreliable.

This observation might account for one pattern I've just been trying to look into over the past couple days -- one that might also be referred to as "floating gallows," but in another sense.

Taking the hypothesis that gallows aren't an inherent part of words, but are only added to words, I tried comparing the statistics for all words containing [k] and [t] against the statistics for the same words without them (in paragraphic text only, leaving out labels, etc.).

Sometimes a reasonably common word with [k] or [t] doesn't have an attested counterpart without the gallows.  For example, there are no tokens of [qoey], [qochdy], [ool], [oey], [yeey], or [chchey].  That could be a problem for the hypothesis.

On the other hand, there are sometimes also curiously complete sets of words in which a gallows can be found inserted at every point in a relatively common gallows-less word -- almost.

At the risk of either stating the obvious or otherwise not contributing:

A logical explanation is that the gallows don't function the same each time they are used.  Certainly the idea of classifying a word differently depending on whether it exists only with or both with and without a gallows has been suggested before (e.g. the nebulous Grove words).  

Is it possible that the actual function of the gallows changes and that change can been seen depending on whether it is a "necessary" component of word to make it a "valid" Voynichese word as compared to a component that can be placed anywhere within an otherwise "valid word"?

I'm sure it is not lost on anyone that the second of these two "functions," actually a non-function, is a null.

Is there some way to test whether the possible function of gallows that move within otherwise "valid" words is acting as a null?