Summary of Voynich Day presentation on Line Patterns

[MarcoP]

(calculated across the manuscript as a whole): lines ending [m] appear to be followed by lines beginning [q] only around 58% as often as they "should."  Given that lines beginning [q] also feature prominently in this Vertical Impact Effect, I wonder how these two apparent anomalies might be interacting with each other.

Hi Patrick,
I wrote a quick script to check the different sections, and I get the impression that q-starting lines and m-ending lines are anti-correlated. E.g. Q13/Bio has many q-starting lines and few m-ending lines (the ratio is about 3:1). Q20/Stars shows the opposite: 1 q-starting line for 3 m-ending lines. All sections show a strong unbalance, so the two features are unlikely to appear consecutively in any one section, but could be expected to be frequent if one considers the text as a whole, since both features are overall frequent on the average.

   

I think it's striking that o-o and q-q vertical repetitions are absent from HA with so few exceptions. Typically, Voynich patterns appear as preferences rather than hard rules. This is of course different at word level, where word structure has rules with only a minimum of exceptions.