[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Language, by definition, is a system for conveying information, and word order is one of the primary mechanisms for signaling relationships between words — such as who is doing what to whom.

It seems that you are conflating two senses of "word order" here.

In a telephone number, the order of the digits is terribly important: swap two digits and the number will not work.  However, in the "language"  of telephone numbers, there is no "digit order" -- in the sense that any digit may occur at any position in the number.

(On the other hand, for telephones from a specific geographical context, some digits will be more common than others in certain positions of the numbers.  And these anomalies will be different in different contexts...)

[natural laguages have] Preferred or default orders (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object in English, Subject-Object-Verb in Japanese). [...] This also holds true for East Asian languages. See for instance these articles about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 

That does not mean that "in every language, certain words can only appear at the beginning/middle/end of sentences"   I don't speak Chinese (or any of my "Chinese" languages, unfortunately), but Google Translate gives me these 

• "The selling room is here."  ▶ 售卖室在这里 ≡ Shòu mài shì zài zhè lǐ.
  
• "He sells good stuff." ▶ 他卖的东西不错 ≡ Tā mài de dōng xī bù cuò.
  
• "This car is sold." ▶ 这辆车卖了 ≡ Zhè liàng chē mài le.
  
• "I have a book to sell." ▶ 我有一本书要卖 ≡ Wǒ yǒu yī běn shū yào mài.
  
• "The seller wants to come." ▶ 卖家想来≡ Mài jiā xiǎng lái.
  

Apologies to Chinese speakers if the translations are broken or stilted, but I am sure that the point is correct: the same Mandarin syllable can appear, alone or as a compound, in many different grammatical roles - and hence in any part of a sentence.

The division of the lexicon into four largely disjoint sets -- nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs -- with well-distinguished grammatical roles is a feature of Indo-European languages, not a "linguistic universal".  (II seem to recall Jacques Guy saying that linguists are still desperately trying to find one of these.)  Even English, a creole language that lost most of the characteristic IE features, will often use the same word as any of those categories: "this is a stone", "this is a stone chisel", "stone him", "it is stone hard".

[or natural languages will have] Morphological markers (like case endings) to compensate for word order flexibility.

But a language can have neither word-place segregation nor inflections.  See Mandarin.

[natural languages also have] Discourse patterns, where word order reflects emphasis or focus rather than grammar alone.

Yes, but this goes against your point: the same word may appear in different places of the sentence, depending on the desired emphasis.

The respective frequency counts confirm the general principle: [in the VMS] high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words.

This is true in any natural language, no? Even in English?  "cat" "bat" "fat" "hat" "mat" "pat" "rat" "sat" "vat" "kit" "cot" "cut"  "cab" "cam" "can" "cap" "car" ...  but not so much for "however" or "equinox" ...

I disagree [about the Scribe clean-copying from a draft]. The Voynich text clearly responds to its physical container — the manuscript page. This suggests the text was generated during the act of writing, not copied mechanically from a pre-existing source. The scribe would need to actively choose, at minimum, the words at the end of each line to ensure that the text consistently fits neatly within the available space. That level of precise layout control isn't possible if the text was fully predetermined elsewhere.

When copying running text, Medieval European Scribes (like today's word processors) routinely disregarded line breaks in the draft and inserted line breaks, abbreviations, capitals, flourishes on their own.  Fitting the lines neatly between margins was part of their basic skill set, just as preparing ink and shaping the pen. 

[in the VMS] pairs of frequently used words with high mutual similarity appear. The exact cooccurrences may vary: there are pages where <daiin> is paired with <dain>, but also pages where it is frequently used together with <aiin> (f41v, f46r, f55v, f89v2, v105v and f114r) or <saiin> (f2r, f16r, and f90r2)."

Such occurrences are expected if the words are single syllables. Even in the random 5-sentence above there is a "mài shì zài".

Also, a feature of Mandarin is that when two syllables of certain tones are pronounced in succession, the tone of the second one may be changed to a "simpler" tone (say from "dipping" to "flat") or to a tone similar to that of the first, just for euphonics (like vowel harmony in other languages).  Thus perhaps daiin and aiin and saiin are actually the same word, with different tones because of the different surroundings.

Also, perhaps the system that the Author used to encode tones was to write a letter code for the "current" pitch level and insert such codes when the pitch changed.  E.g. he might have written "Wǒ yǒu yī běn shū yào mài" as "3w1o 53 yo1u3 yi b1en sh3u ya2o 5 ma2i" or in any of dozens of equivalent ways.  Then, again, the same word would be written differently depending on the preceding context.  And, by the way, that could also explain why isolated y, or words beginning with y, are more common at the start of new sentences...

Also, if the VMS was dictated and the Author did not recognize all those plant names and medical terms, he surely must have made lots of mistakes, inconsistently -- writing the same word in different ways each time.  The diaries of the Lewis and Clark expedition were not dictated, but they were similar to that scenario in that the writers were not exactly spelling-bee champions.  I counted five different spellings of the word "buffalo", some even in the same paragraph.

Also, perhaps the spelling system that the Author devised at first was too detailed, and recorded features of the spoken words that were just noise without significance, like the length or loudness of the vowels.  Then that "phonetic noise" would be different each time the Reader spoke the same word.  By the way, that could also explain also the difference between "languages": between one section and the other, the Author's new literate friend explained to him that Mandarin had only four tones -- not seven, as his grocer had categorically affirmed before he started the project.

There is more, but I must end here for now... 

All the best, --jorge