[Blog Post] Rightward and Downward in the Voynich Manuscript - Patrick Feaster

[Emma May Smith]

Hi Marco, thanks for that. If we assume that lines tend to contains the same number of glyphs (which is reasonable over long stretches) then it's clear then word-line length isn't strictly important. However, I suppose that we could still have some effect from two sources:

1. That some glyphs are so tightly-bound to a certain position in words, such as /q/ or /n/, that word-line length would still be important. New instances could only be added to the right hand side of the line with a new word, so the glyph-line length would be less important.
   
2. Other relationships - such as exclusion or inclusion of similar words or proxy line length control - might still play a part.
   

I'm a little vague on my thinking, I know, so will do some experiments myself and see if I can't come up with some actual examples of what I think might be happening.

Patrick, I love that we can bring different phenomenon together and consider how they combine. Do we know the directional cause of overlap vs under/overrepresentation? Can we exclude the influence of the final glyph of a word from impacting the distribution of the initial glyph?