Summary of Voynich Day presentation on Line Patterns

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So for example, ch is 24% of middle initials in Herbal A.  Ceteris paribus, we'd expect to see it be 24% of LS initials, which would be about 300 ch.  We see only 64, so there are over 200 "missing" instances.  This makes initial ch "averse" to Line Start.

I have the impression (based only only recollection as a transcriber) that uncertain spaces are especially common before Ch.  If those are counted as spaces, that could explain the abundance of Ch as word initial outside of line start.  Unfortunately all transcriptions handle ambiguous spaces inconsistently. They may be marked as "." or ",", or just omitted.  Since inter-word and inter-character spaces are highly variable, even along the same line, the marking is inherently subjective.

Then there is also the bias of the line-breaking algorithm that makes longer words more common in line-initial position.  If Ch is a more common start for short words, that could be part of the reason why Ch is less common in line-initial position than elsewhere.

This last theory could be tested by tabulating the frequency of word-inital Ch as a function of word length.  Preferably excluding parag head lines and line-initial words.

All the best, --jorge