Relations among pattern studies?

[ReneZ]

I definitely agree that there's a close connection between the patterns I was describing and the network you (and Schinner) have written about.  Still, I want to be careful when drawing conclusions about what's causing what.  You write here that the so-called "loop" properties are caused by the network (first paragraph), but then that the network is in turn caused by a "deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial vicinity of tokens" (second paragraph).  Since I'd consider "deep correlation between frequency, similarity, and spatial vicinity of tokens" to be a reasonably good description of the system I was describing, those two paragraphs strike me as forming a little loop of their own.  So what came first, the chicken or the egg?

On the one hand, we have a network of similar words whose frequency correlates remarkably well with their degree of similarity to a few specific models.

On the other hand, we have a set of generative rules (involving glyph-by-glyph transitional probabilities) that would produce approximately that same set of words with approximately the same frequencies.  Other models (e.g., some "word paradigms") may be able to do the same.

If I understand things correctly, the self-citation hypothesis holds that the network exists due to the dynamics of copying words with minor changes, guided by the subjective / aesthetic preferences of the writer (and hence non-random).  Still, if we could identify a set of more concrete and specific rules, and had to account for its relationship with a network of words that just happened to follow those rules, I'd think Occam's razor would point to the rules causing the network rather than the network causing the rules.

I tend to agree with all of this, and realise that it is a quite condensed summary of a broad topic.

The network of similar words is real and it is of great interest. Languages tend not to work that way. Number systems work that way, but the Voynich network is far too complex to be 'just' a number system.

It may have several different causes or origins. I see three main possibilities, but there could certainly be more.

1. It just arose as a consequence of the authors generating words one at the time using the self-citation method
2. This is the vocabulary that was generated before the MS was written (using this vocabulary)
3. It is the consequence of some verbose method to convert plain text

Options 1 and 2 are similar yet opposite. The self-citation method could have been used to create a list of words before writing the text.

What may not be immediately obvious is that the network of similar words stands out even more for consistent avoidances than for the allowed modifications that create the pattern.

This concept of avoiding things was one of the points that stood out to me in the presentation by Tavie, in particular avoiding consecutive lines starting with the same character. Even when human attempts at doing something at random will not be random, but develop certain preferred patterns, avoiding things has a different dimension to me.
This is more like the result of planning, or the indirect consequence of some rules.