Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

[pfeaster]

Nicely put.  My own feeling is that it's easier to account for phenomena such as Smith-Ponzi word-break combinations if we imagine spaces being inserted into fundamentally continuous sequences of glyphs.

I lean the other way, since the word-end glyphs also look like they have been designed for word end. Look at the practice of using a special last minim in roman numerals, for example (xviij). This is similar to [iin]. Similar things can be said about [y] and for example the "-us" abbreviation. I mean, the glyphs kind of look like they belong where we find them most often. 

Although gallows with prefixes may be an exception. [qoty] just looks bad.

These views aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Imagine, for example, a system in which letters of the alphabet are encoded as Roman numerals, with the value of every odd-numbered letter being multiplied by 100.  Thus:

mmccxvmmdxivcmiiidcccxiiicxivmmcxixcccxviiicmxvimm = VOYNICHMANUSCRIPT

This represents a continuous underlying string of text (there's a word break, but it isn't encoded), and it's unambiguous even without breaks inserted.  At the same time, it would be helpful for the reader -- and respect the nature of the encoding scheme -- to separate the segments like this (note the closing "j" where appropriate):

mmccxv mmdxiv cmiij dcccxiij cxiv mmcxix cccxviij cmxvj mm

It would be interesting to see what Sukhotin's algorithm would predict are the vowels and consonants here.  I'm not suggesting this is precisely how Voynichese works -- just offering it as a model for imagining how spaces might be functioning within it.

In this scheme (or in the Naibbe cipher, for that matter):

(1) Are the spaces "really spaces"?
(2) Do the spaces make the writing system more or less predictable than it would otherwise be?