[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In linguistics, word order refers to the structured arrangement of words in a sentence that signals grammatical relationships. It does not imply that specific words are rigidly restricted to the beginning, middle, or end of sentences.

Sorry if I was not clear, but that is indeed what I meant.  

The second sentence above implies that attempts to identify word classes based on frequencies at begin/middle/end of sentences (or paragraphs, or lines) would only work for some natural languages.

Chinese provides a great example of how word order functions in a language that has minimal inflection (i.e., very few endings or case markers) and relies heavily on strict word order to convey meaning. Changing the word order can either make the sentence ungrammatical or completely change its meaning.

I will not be surprised if there is a three-character sentence in Mandarin such that all six permutations of its characters can be read as grammatically correct sentences.  I would bet a beer and pizza slice that there are many such examples...

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".

No, all known natural languages use for instance some form of function words or grammatical markers, though the way they appear can vary dramatically.

Sorry, "No" to what?  This statement does not negate what I wrote above. 

Function words are words that don't carry lexical meaning themselves, but instead serve a grammatical role — structuring the sentence and clarifying relationships between words.

Sure.  But here is what the dictionary says about the first function word of Mandarin that I picked at random with Google, 
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1. along [preposition]
   
2. to follow (a line, tradition etc) [verb]
   
3. to carry on [verb]
   
4. to trim (a border with braid, tape etc) [verb]
   
5. border [noun? adjective?]
   
6. edge [noun]
   

There is no known natural language without function words or functional equivalents.

With the caveats "or functional equivalents", this is a trivial tautology.

If the Voynich text represents plain natural language it should be easy to identify function words or some common markers used for indicating the relationships between words.

It is not easy at all, if the function words of the language can also be used in roles that in IE languages would be served by nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  Especially when the function word can be part of hundreds of two-syllable compounds with special meanings, each compound acting in multiple of those roles...

And it is not easy at all if the language actually is East Asian or Aboriginal or Mesaomerican, but the would-be crackers will refuse to consider those possibilities because "the dresses and hats are obviously European, so it must be an European language".

Sorry, but I’m not sure how your statement explains the specific situation in the Voynich Manuscript, where the line itself behaves as a functional unit, with both line-start and line-end patterns being consistently observable.

"line starts and line end patterns are clearly observable" does not imply "lines are functional units".  This is an hypothesis that needs good additional evidence to become likely.

If the line is a "functional unit", how do you explain that most of those "functional units" happen to have the right number of glyphs to precisely span the width of the text?  And why is the last "functional unit" of a page almost always shorter, ending at some random point between the text rails  (and, in some sections, it is the only "functional unit" that is like that)?

On page f112r, after writing the first "functional unit" at full width, the Scribe apparently noticed that there was something wrong with he vellum in that area (perhaps oily, or too absorbent, or too rough, or whatever) and thus reduced the text width by ~30% for "functional units" 2 to 20, and returned to normal width after that.  Was that layout planned by the Author, too?

On page f112v, the same vellum problem apparently caused the Scribe to indent "functional units" 1-10 by ~3 cm, then exdent "functional unit" 11 by ~1 cm, and continue to the end of the page with a left rail that was quite a bit slanted away from vertical; while the right rail was all straight and vertical. Semantically significant too?

All the best, --jorge