Tested K&A at scale, found something, need your help

[CorwinFr]

This is how abbreviation systems work: special markers for word boundaries and structural positions, separate from the content characters. That's one of the reasons the Tironian shorthand model fits — Tironian notes use dedicated strokes for positional modification of base signs.

But this is not a particularly strong argument? If two things have a common feature, this doesn't mean they are the same thing. It's a bit like saying "a giraffe is yellow and has spots, so giraffes are leopards". The statistics regarding paragraph initial characters have been well known for decades, Tironian notes have been researched in the context of the Voynich Manuscript many times, I think successfully linking both requires a valid model that would explain how exactly this notation works.

You're right that shared features don't prove identity, that's a fair objection. I'm not claiming the VMS is Tironian.

I'm claiming personal mnemonic shorthand is a serious hypothesis that hasn't been adequately explored.

The reasoning is simple: if this were a straightforward cipher or a known language, someone would have solved it by now. 600 years of brilliant minds have failed.

That failure itself is a constraint, it tells us the search space is probably not what we think it is.

A cipher has a finite key space. A language has phonetic structure. Both are attackable. But a personal mnemonic system, abbreviations invented by one person for his own use, memorized through daily practice, never shared, creates a search space that is essentially infinite. There is no key to find, no grammar to reverse-engineer. That would explain the resistance to decryption better than any cipher or language model.

Tironian notes are the historical precedent for exactly this kind of system: arbitrary base signs, personal modifications, positional markers. I'm not saying "the VMS is Tironian", I'm saying the structural properties I observe (positional constraints, prefix+root+suffix compounds, logograms for function words) are consistent with that tradition. It's a hypothesis, not a conclusion.

If someone has a better model that explains both the structural regularities AND 600 years of failed decryption, I'm genuinely interested.