Separable "words"

[Rafal]

In this post, my interest is in what Zattera called “separable words”. By this he meant “words” which could be divided into two parts, each of which was a Voynich “word”

That's an interesting observation. I noticed it myself too, although without using any statistics.

Most of Voynich words (or "vords" as some people call it) have very rigid structure:

beginning part - middle part - end part

You can skip some parts so you can have for example "middle-end" word or just "end" word. But you can't have "middle-middle" for example.

Voynich words are generally short, especially if we consider stuff like "aiiin" as single symbol. But there are some longer words which indeed seem to have the
structure:

beginning-middle-end-beginning-middle-end

My guess is that Voynich uses some method that enables to encode let's say 3 letters in a row. It you wan't to encode more, than you have to repeat it which gives this form to longer words.

And another guess - words are very radically abbreviated. It works well with common words but stuff like names of plants cannot be abbreviated because you wouldn't guess what they mean. So longer words are things like plant names.

Please notice that longest words are also the rarest words. It would make perfects sense if some plant is mentioned only at its page.