On plain texts and ciphers (a thought experiment)

[Emma May Smith]

Emma, how would you interpret this example that I posted in the other thread? Here Voynich doesn't seem to represent a language with 1-to-2 syllable words, but rather an agglutinative language that keeps adding suffixes (and maybe prefixes)?

I would guess that all but two of the words you posted are one or two syllables. I don't know what would indicate differently. Also, the words may be getting phonologically longer with each character added, but there's no reason to believe that they're getting morphologically longer. "Lips" has both more sounds and more morphemes than "lip", but "clip" only has more sound. All three are a single syllable long.

qot
qoteo
qoteol
qotcho
qotchol
qotcheo
qotcheol
qotol

I'll only look at a portion of the words so that readers aren't bored, but the above words strike me as simply what they appear to be: words which differ by a single sound. Imagine we applied some sound values to the Voynich letters to give the following list:

hab
habja
habjan
habla
hablan
hablja
habljan
haban

What is odd about this? Apart from the last none of the words is all that common. And though you can find small clusters on a few pages, it is something to explore rather than worry over. Is there any proof that these words are related either semantically or morphologically? Proving it would be a breakthrough but assuming it a danger. We can't even assume that words spelt the same are the same. Thinking back to the example given above: is "clips" a noun or a verb?

Some words do occur very often near to one another with minor variations and this is a known problem. Quire 13 and 20 have huge numbers of [qokeedy, qokedy, okeedy, okedy] in very dense patches. It remains to be explained, but it could be a feature of the content rather than the language or the script. Given that those four words are wholly absent from great lengths of the manuscript, the former is quite possible.