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

[pfeaster]

Thus we could potentially explain rightwardness in this way: words which appear more to the left have the "ability" to make lines longer or words which appear more to the right have the "ability" to make lines shorter. 

I'm not sure if this is quite the sort of experiment you have in mind, but I just tried calculating the average line length (in words) for tokens of some of the word pair categories where one type tends to score rightward of the other.

Mostly the results ended up looking like insignificant statistical noise.  But there was one case that looks as though it might fit your hypothesis somewhat consistently.

In Currier A, the average length of a line containing a word that contains [k] is 7.27 words, while the average length of a line containing a word that contains [t] is 7.04 words.  Nine of the ten specific word pairs of this kind with the highest token counts follow this same pattern, with the [k] word tending to appear in longer lines than the [t] word:

[cThy] 6.79, [cKhy] 7.29
[qotchy] 6.13, [qokchy] 6.53
[oty] 7, [oky] 7.74
[cThol] 6.45, [cKhol] 8.11
[otol] 7.69, [okol] 8.11
[otaiin] 7.27, [okaiin] 7.38
[qoty] 7.4, [qoky] 7.10 (the exception)
[qotol] 6.63, [qokol] 8.37
[cThor] 6.85, [cKhor] 7.88
[cThey] 7.48, [cKhey] 7.85

The [t] words appear more to the right and are associated with shorter lines, while the [k] words appear more to the left and are associated with longer lines.

But this pattern doesn't extend to Currier B.  And neither of my other two "sample" sets of contrastive graphemic minimal word pairs shows a similar pattern.  That's not to say there aren't any potentially significant-looking differences.  For example, in Currier B, the words starting [Sh] are in lines averaging 8.97 words in length, while the words starting [ch] are in lines averaging 9.32 words in length, so now the more rightward type [ch] seems to correlate with longer lines -- but this time the most common individual word pairs don't show any coherent-looking pattern.