My thoughts on the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

JKP, Thomas, thank you for your work on the text analysis, for bringing up the issues of spaces, null words, word structure in the VMs etc. I've found many important points for myself, moreover, I want to do my bit, too. 
I've made a comparative table of word combinations (pairs) with the two VMs words: ol and qol. 


This short table shows only the matched combinations, but there are many other matched and not matched ones in the VMs. Anyway, I didn't expect 100% matching between them. Is that enough to conclude that ol and qol are the same words and q-glyph is a null character? Honestly, it seemed to me very promising idea in spite of that this table can't be a master card.  It could be successful for my theory, as well (I won't go into details here).
 I want to pay your attention to the word combinations from the group of "okedy" and "otedy" words. The difference is in e, ee, eee, ch, and, of course, in the "q"-presence. There are all the combinations (if I didn't miss some):
1) 
okedy okedy
okedy okeedy 
okeedy okchdy
okedy qokeedy
okeedy qokedy
qokeedy okeedy
qokeedy okedy
qokedy qokedy
qokedy qokeedy
qokeedy qokedy
qokeedy qokeedy
qokedy qokchdy
qokeedy qokchdy
qokchdy qokedy
qokchdy qokchdy
2)
otedy okedy
otedy okeedy
oteedy okedy
otedy qokchdy
oteedy qokeedy
qotedy okeedy
qoteedy okeedy
qotedy okchdy
qoteedy qokeedy
qotchdy qokchdy

Personally I find the variety of these incredibly similar word pairs strange. I'm at a loss and can't decide whether they are only two real word combinations or all these in their distinctions. I think, it could be a stronger argument in favour of the supposition about null "q"-character. On the other hand, in this case, if we mentally take away all the q-characters we get You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 
The excessive richness with these words in the "balneo-" and "recies-" sections is too strange, even for incantations.
Ultimately, I'm still confused. Maybe, someone has a fresh explanation for this phenomenon.

This is wonderful work, Searcher! I think you have made a wonderful argument for a null character, possibly <q>!

At one time I also wondered if there is a null character (or null characters) in the text. I didn't focus on <q> but I wondered if <o> and <e> were the nulls, because they are often interchangeable, and there are versions of the same strings with different numbers of <e>'s and <o>'s (and you have noticed this also). Here are examples from my notes, if this helps:

qo-ko--dyqoted-y
qo-ke--dyqoted-y
qo-kee-dyqoted-y

qo-te--dyqoted-y
qo-tee-dyqoted-y

op-she-dyqoted-y
op-che-dyqoted-y
op-ch--dyqoted-y

she-dyqoted-y
sh--dyqoted-y

aiin-che-dyqoted-y-
aiin-ch--dyqoted-y-

However, my observation does not explain why <qol> words can also have <ol> counterparts.
I also don't know "whether they are only two real word combinations or all these in their distinctions," but my guess is that some characters are repeated to disguise the text, in the same way that we have <ain, aiin, aiiin>.

Nick Pelling posted this example of two strings that repeat on page 84r (this is the longest repeating text in the VMS), and one way that they differ is the number of <e> characters:

<f84r.P.3> shedy qokedy qokeedy qokedy  chedy okain chey
<f84r.P.10> shedy qokedy qokeedy qokeedy chedy raiin chey
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So I agree with you - something looks like it may be a null