[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Jorge_Stolfi]

On systematic shifts between A and B:  The differences between Currier A and B [...] are surely far too extensive to ascribe to only subject matter.

Why would you say so?  Would the word frequencies of an English article on Greek Philosophy and a technical manual of analytic chemistry be less different than those of, say, Herbal and Recipes?

(or indeed Lisa's top three scribes)

The Scribes issue is too complicated to discuss here.  Anyway it is about alleged differences in handwriting, not word statistics.

Word types are different at line start than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply adding a new initial glyph onto a word type for whatever reason.  Both middle glyphs and final glyphs can be different.

Word types are different at line end than elsewhere in the line.  It is more than simply a final glyph cluster being abbreviated into final m.  We often see different initials as well.  Glyphs pop up in common line end words in ways that aren't common in mid-line words.

Song lyrics typically capitalize the first letter of each line and mostly omit any punctuation that should appear at the end of each line (for reasons that actually make musical sense).  Line breaks are somewhat constrained by the song's rhytm, and there are reasons to keep lines short, but otherwise the "scribe" is free to select them to fit the available text width. 

I am not saying that any part of the VMS is poetry or songs, or that some glyphs (other than one-leg gallows) are capitals or punctuation.  Just showing an example of how a meaningful plaintext in natural language can have different character statistics at start, middle, and end of lines.

And I cannot think of any natural-language reason for how scribes avoid certain glyphs appearing under other ones.

What do you mean? Would this not be a consequence of other more "natural" fearures?

Word types are different at paragraph start, at the line end of top row, and importantly in the middle of top row.

Consider this hypothetical text:

• Xeroxcopyta voynichensis, also called Xenophobia maxima: good for urticaria, emacs pinkie, coffe addiction. Take 3 oz daily as tea or poultice morning, lunch, and bedtime. Collect leaves in summer. Grows on mountains and hills.
  
• Smilax ferox, which in the Isle of Manx is called Quux: good for urticaria, memory parity errors, software rot.  Take 1 oz/day ground in a capsule at bedtime. Collect seeds in summer or fall. Grows on hills.
  
• Narnia botox, apud Xenophon, not found here in Manx: good for urticaria, ingrown toenail, gluten addiction, tomatophobia. Drink 2 oz per day as tea at bedtime and breakfast until tongue turns green. Pick the leaves in the fall under full moon. Grows in valleys and hills.
  

Can you see how natural-language text can have different word "types" and even different glyph frequencies in different parts of each paragraph?

By the way: when doing this type of analysis, one should work with a single homogeneous section of the VMS.  Different sections clearly have different paragraph semantic structures.  Stuffing all together into any statistics algorithm will produce results that will be hard to interpret.

I cannot see how this is like a natural language.  There are two overlapping questions that I take from it:  1. How can these patterns be compatible with meaning and 2. How were these patterns produced? [...] The meaningless hypothesis has a big advantage in that the first question is settled.

Quite the opposite.  One big problem of the meaningless hypothesis is that the generating "algorithm" would have to be extremely complicated to produce all the variation we see in the VMS -- from section to section, over the span of paragraphs and lines, in labels and circular text, ... Whereas such variations are quite possible, and indeed expected, under the natural language hypothesis.