Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I don’t like throwing out baseless theories or overcomplicating things, but I can’t help noticing that the characters most common at the beginnings of lines (except the first lines of paragraphs) are also the ones that most resemble Arabic numerals in the Voynich.

So the first letter could be a key to use in encryption/decryption algorithm for the rest of the line?  Like the shift of a Caesar cipher, or the column of a table of more arbitrary encryption substitution ciphers?

I can imagine someone in the 1400s inventing such a scheme.  

One could test that theory by separating all lines into subsets based on their first glyph, computing the word frequency distribution of each subset (excluding the first word of each line) and comparing those distributions.

However, there is the problem that any position-dependent cipher would almost surely encode each occurrence of the same word type as two or more distinct words.  That would flatten out the frequency x rank plot ("Zipf plot") at the high frequency end -- which does not seem to be the case.

(And, just for the record, I stil believe that the VMS is not encrypted at all.)

All the best, --jorge