My thoughts on the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

Thanks for the insight about abbreviations Marco!

This morning I opened the Takahashi transcription and wrote down how often certain characters appear in relation to each other. Here are some of the results:

• <l> appears 10,518 times in Takahashi's text. In 5.5 out of 10 times, it appears before <o>, and 3 out of 10 times, it appears before <a>. So 85% of the time that <l> appears in the VMS, it is either in an <al> or <ol> combination.
  
  
• <r> appears 7456 times. In 3251 of those cases, it is in an <ar> combination, and in 2897 cases it appears in <or>. So, 82% of the time in the entire VMS, <r> is in one of these two clusters.
  
  
• <d> appears 12,973 times. In 6876 cases, it is followed by <y>.
  
  
• <k> appears 10,934 times, but in 6206 cases (the majority of the time) it comes after <o>.
  
  
• <t> appears 6944 times in the entire VMS, but in 3914 of those usages it comes after <o>.
  

I hope this will illustrate why I believe there are 2-letter combinations in the Voynich Manuscript.

I also wonder what these statistics mean for a linguistic analysis - many of the "consonants" are severely restricted in ways that are unusual for most (but not all) natural languages.