What are Voynichese words?

[oshfdk]

On the cipher framing: I agree that treating the glyphs as having no semantics of their own is reasonable. But the structural question remains regardless. I am curious whether you see these patterns arising from a system that operates before encoding (a language, notation, or formal system), or from one that operates during encoding?

The latter, I expect the underlying plaintext to be quite normal descriptive language, not a poem, spells or charms. The presence of a charm on the last page of a book was, as far as I understand, one of the cultural norms of the time, so I don't think we can extrapolate from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to the rest of the MS. The structure of the text itself is quite normal - there are paragraphs of various lengths with short trailing lines, there are labels of different lengths. There is no obvious visual rhythmic structure to the way paragraphs are written, so I would rather bet on some structurally unremarkable plaintext encoded in a way that produces these strange patterns.

Of course, I don't know if the above is correct or not, but this is the working hypothesis I take.

And what properties would such a system need in order to reproduce the observed boundary and continuation effects?

I'm not sure this is the right question, I believe there are many totally different ways to create these patterns. This is I think the approach @magnesium took with the Naibbe cipher - recreating some of the statistical properties of Voynichese in a plausible way. Does this bring us closer to understanding how the Voynich Manuscript was created? I don't know.

One thing that is almost certain is that if Voynichese is a cipher, it's a one to many cipher, one that allows encoding the same plaintext in many possible ways.