About word length distribution

[davidd]

This seems very unlikely. If you examine the writing in the manuscript you will notice that there is a fluency to it. There doesn't appear to be much stop-start in the text. The words in each line broadly keep to the same baseline. The writer isn't putting the pen down after each word to roll dice ( nor for that matter to consult any book cypher or perform any mathematical computation to determine what the next word should be ). In my opinion the writing of each page was done in one sitting in one uninterrupted rush of effort.

The script in principle allows this fluent type of writing. Now this is crucially important, because in that respect it differs from essentially all old ciphers based on invented alphabets, be they mono-alphabetic or poly-alphabetic.

However, in practice it is rarely written in a fluent matter. The baseline jumps up and down irregularly, and the direction of the baseline of individual words is not always very straight either. I am sure that the quality varies throughout the MS.

To see what I mean, just look closely at the words in the first two lines here:
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Many other examples (good and bad) can be found.

If the VMS was copied from a previous MS this would remove weird starting and stopping. also they could have prepared on a chalk board/charcoal/writing in the sand before committing  text to the page.