"Abnormal" words

[Mark Knowles]

The document below took me some time to produce:

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I have plenty to say about it, but I thought I would start by sharing it.

I have been going through the whole Voynich manuscript with the aim of compiling a list of the words with the most distinctive spellings. I have done this by crossing out in red on each page the most repetitive words as they seem to be and putting a yellow box around words which seem to me to have more distinctive spellings. I already had enough familiarity with the Voynich to be able to recognise the most repetitive words. Then of those more distinctive words I have put a green star next to those words which seem to be the most distinctive. Then I have copied those green starred words into a separate document, so I can see them altogether; this is the document above. Obviously to include all the annotated pages would leave a rather large file, though I can share those if desired. I have done this process manually for a variety of reasons. I don't know how accurate the Voynich transcriptions are especially when dealing with rare characters and where I might disagree with the interpretation of spaces.
 
I could have tried to automate the process considering Levenshtein distance or some other measure of distinctiveness, but I was not sure that I would be satisfied with the end result, although it could save time. Also, this process has forced me to look at the whole text and think about it.
 
So, of course, the end result is somewhat subjective.
 
I have covered all the pages. There are a number of pages with text written around a circle which is a bit of a nuisance to study. However I have managed to document them. I have ignored marginalia and other non-Voynichese text such as michitonese.
 
I have listed where each text appears on each page.
 
This is my first draft.