vague thoughts for an approach

[MarcoP]

1) If I understand correctly, you are suggesting a one-to-one mapping between Voynichese and plain-text words. This approach is often referred to as a “nomenclator” (the dictionary you mention). Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota was a medieval artificial language conceived along those lines. Bowern and Lindemann, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., discuss some statistical evidence that partially supports the idea, but there are problems. One is the consecutive repetition of identical words (e.g. daiin.daiin.daiin): these occur with a frequency that is not seen in European languages. Another problem is that one would expect to find frequent repeating bi-words like the English “of the”, but these are rare in the Voynich manuscript.

2) If the text is meaningless, it is not clear that the author was consciously following “designed” rules. See Gaskell and Bowern You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., for a discussion of how spontaneous meaningless text often shows regularities (depending on the writer).

3) A possibility for a preference to appear at the end of lines is that a character is an abbreviation: the scribe chooses to use it more often to squeeze a word into a line. This kind of preference is sometimes seen in medieval manuscripts. But the problem of line-effects (and paragraph-effects) is much more complex in Voynichese. See Patrick Feaster, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..