[Movie] Voynich Talk E3: Why your Voynich theory is wrong (pt2)

[Mauro]

I recently decided to read through the whole manuscript and make digital annotations. My chief focus has been on words with distinctive spelling. It is my observation that words with more distinctive spelling and less common glyphs are often ignored by researchers. I think this is a big mistake.

I agree that most of the research has been done on frequent words while rare readings have been overlooked, and it's surely possible that the rare readings are what is actually important. But there are also reasons for concentrating on frequent combinations: rare things make bad statistics or, to see it another way, they are noisy and difficult to work with. Scribal errors, retracing errors (if there was actually a retracer), ambiguity of handwritten characters, transcription errors... they're all big problems when rare glyph groups are concerned.