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

[MarcoP]

Just to as a note, Sean Palmers Voynich MS glyph position stacks might be some useful for this topic

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That page clearly illustrates the rigid word structure of Voynichese. It is possible to draw similar plots where cells represent word statistics (rather than character statistics) and each row represents a set of lines with a certain number of words (rather than a set of words with a certain number of characters). I limited line lengths to the 7-12 range in order to have a sufficient number of samples.
Palmer's plots show that there are couples of similar characters that behave quite similarly in relation to word structure. Patrick's findings suggest that similar characters tend to be complementary in relation to line structure: when one is more frequent, the other is rarer, as if they were selected on the basis of the position of the word inside a line.

These are plots for 'k' and 't', where Palmer's plots have been negated so that 0 corresponds to black and 1 to bright red (k) or green (t); contrast has also been increased. The plots for 'k' and 't' look similar and, if they are combined as RGB channels of a single image (at the bottom), the result mostly consists of lighter or darker yellow tones, with little or no green or red.
Line plots (on the right) look very different from each other and combining them mostly results in reddish / greenish areas corresponding to the prevalence of 'k' or 't'. In particular, 'k' is more prevalent just before mid-line, while 't' is more frequent at line-start and near line-end, resulting in two greenish areas at the left and right.

   

The same can be done for 'ch' and 'sh'. The v101 transliteration used by Palmer includes different codes for sh with different plumes: since 2 appears to be the most frequent, I only considered that. Again, in Palmer's plots, 'ch' and 'sh' are similar and the combined plot shows much yellow and little green or red. On the contrary, line plots show two coloured areas: greenish at the left, where 'sh' is particularly frequent, reddish at the center, where 'ch' prevails.