The oddities of the bigram "ed"

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It's been known for many years that the bigram "ed" is just plain odd. It occurs in the Voynich as a midfix 4,474 times and as a suffix 186 times.  Never as a prefix.  That may not sound that striking but this chart shows just how striking it is.

In my structural model for Voynichese words, the e glyph either occurs as a pair ee, which works as a single "letter" in the same class as Ch and Sh (and may be just a handwriting variant of Ch) or singly as a modifier for a preceding Ch, Sh, ee, k, t (not p or f), or a platform gallows (CTh, CKh, CPh, CFh).

A consequence of this model of the "true alphabet" is that ed cannot appear at the beginning of a word.  It can appear in words like keedy (parsed as {k}{ee}{d}{y}), chedaiin (parsed as {che}{d}{a}{iin}), yCThedam (parsed as {y}{CThe}{d}{a}{m}) etc.

But I must insist that statistics of characters and digraphs are bound to be more confusing than illuminating.  Their frequencies are mostly determined by whether they occur in the most common words; and these in turn may be highly dependent on the topic.

For example, the digraph "rb" may be significantly more common in a Latin herbal text than in an astronomical text, because it occurs in the word "herba".  

The digraph "ed" may be more frequent in an English chronicle than in an English herbal, because of its occurrence in verbs inflected in the past tense.

And the "th" digraph may be less common at the beginning of a line in any English text, because its frequency there is determined by the occurrence of the common words that begin with it: "the", "this", "that", "then", "they", "them", "there", "thus", etc -- but those common words are relatively short, and when text is formatted into paragraphs the first word of each line tends to be longer than average, while short words are more likely to fit at the end of each line.  

Thus statistics of words and word pairs are usually more illuminating than statistics of characters or digraphs.

All the best, --stolfi