Yes, everything is tricky, for a change. Stolfi aimed at describing things as they appear on the page. The observation that Voynichese has a rigid structure lends itself to be formally described as a grammar and that is what Stolfi very successfully did.
One can formally describe rewrite rules to take Voynichese closer to a hypothetical "underlying structure" which the writing system doesn't always represent directly. E.g. Emma did this with her hypothesis of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Emma's post tries to make sense of [o] and [a/y] as corresponding to two entities with very similar roles in word-structure. Though there may be other explanations, an obvious parallel is phonetics and how vowels are largely interchangeable. Since Voynichese looks close to a pronounceable phonetic system (partly because of the circle/non-circle alternation), the needed adjustments are small. In this case, rewriting is largely driven by apparent structure, but the goal is not simply describing what is on the page, but reconstructing an "original".
A further step is making the hypothesis that structure suggests obfuscation, as with your hypothesis that circles do not repeat because such repetitions are hidden by a one-to-many (homophonic) cipher with specific rules based on context (if I understand correctly). In that case, inferring the underlying system becomes very hard, since one cannot rely on apparent structure (which largely results from rewriting, not from underlying structure). Verbose ciphers and/or nulls could probably fit into this kind of rewriting.
The final step is assuming that all the structure we see is entirely due to rewrite rules, with possibly no "underlying" system or meaning (Timm and Schinner).
One can formally describe rewrite rules to take Voynichese closer to a hypothetical "underlying structure" which the writing system doesn't always represent directly. E.g. Emma did this with her hypothesis of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Emma's post tries to make sense of [o] and [a/y] as corresponding to two entities with very similar roles in word-structure. Though there may be other explanations, an obvious parallel is phonetics and how vowels are largely interchangeable. Since Voynichese looks close to a pronounceable phonetic system (partly because of the circle/non-circle alternation), the needed adjustments are small. In this case, rewriting is largely driven by apparent structure, but the goal is not simply describing what is on the page, but reconstructing an "original".
A further step is making the hypothesis that structure suggests obfuscation, as with your hypothesis that circles do not repeat because such repetitions are hidden by a one-to-many (homophonic) cipher with specific rules based on context (if I understand correctly). In that case, inferring the underlying system becomes very hard, since one cannot rely on apparent structure (which largely results from rewriting, not from underlying structure). Verbose ciphers and/or nulls could probably fit into this kind of rewriting.
The final step is assuming that all the structure we see is entirely due to rewrite rules, with possibly no "underlying" system or meaning (Timm and Schinner).
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)