My thoughts on the VMS

[-JKP-]

In the spirit of collaboration, here are two things I've noticed:

1. o can appear next to almost every other Voynich letter and frequent combinations (and it is the only Voynich letter that can do this):
oe, qo, ot, ok, or, oy, om, oi, oiin, of, op, os, oo, oa, ol, oSh

2. I made a chart of the qo- words. It is not a full chart, but it should be helpful to someone researching this topic:

Thomas, I should probably explain what I mean when I say the spaces could be arbitrary or contrived (not saying they are, but that the possibility is there).

When I say arbitrary, I mean this:

  On ceup on atimet herew a sac ast leo nthem oun tain. (No particular pattern to the word breaks.)


When I say contrived, I mean this:

  On ce upon atime the re w as ac astle on the moun t ain. (Planning the word breaks so they fall before and after certain letters.)

Since contrived spacing is still relatively easy to read, add a couple of null characters, a common character like "o", and something that looks like a Latin prefix/suffix abbreviation like "9" and you get this:

On9 oce9 upon9 atime the9 ore9 ow as9 ac oastle ...


And then apply a simple substitution code using Voynichese characters, treating u/v/w as the same glyph, and you get something with many of the properties of the VMS—a lot of short words of approximately the same length with a large number of certain characters (characters that may be a combination of real letters and nulls, depending on position) showing up at the beginnings and ends of words by design.


I've said I lean fairly strongly toward the not-natural-language camp but the above process results in something rather like Voynichese, which is why I still think there's a possibility that it might be.


So, with reference to your chart, if it's a natural language with contrived spaces (especially if there are also null characters), lists of words with similar beginnings might not reveal as much as one would hope. If it's a constructed language, the lists are likely helpful.