[split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text

[MarcoP]

Emma’s idea that there was a conscious or unconscious “rule” for treating the first position of each line in a special way focuses on the individual observation about the abnormal words at line start. It’s a puzzling scenario, but in recent years things have become even more interesting.

In his You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., Patrick has shown that lines have biases that are not limited to the first and last positions in lines. Using his visualization method, one can see, for example, that, in Currier B, the character sequences You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.have roughly mirrored preferences, with peaks on the second and second to last positions respectively. (EDIT: this is the same style of visualization as in dashstofsk's post above, I of course agree that it's extremely helpful; by developing this idea, Patrick has provided a powerful new tool for understanding the details of the text).
   
A consequence of these preferences is that lines where an occurrence of ‘she’ precedes an occurrence of ‘ot’ are twice as frequent as those where an occurrence of ‘ot’ precedes an occurrence of ‘she’. As Patrick has shown, the phenomenon is pervasive.
   

It also has a vertical component, where characters and bigrams show preferences for the top or bottom lines of paragraphs. As for line-start anomalies, the most blatant cases of paragraph preferences (like the behaviour of p) have been known for a long time.

In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. added another piece to the puzzle by showing that line-start anomalies also follow vertical patterns, so that the character added at line N appears to depend on the character added at the start of line N+1. 
As she wrote above:

the line start word appears to be impacted in many cases by the word above it

In particular, in Currier A, these line-initial (apparently added) characters are placed in such a way that they do not repeat at the start of two consecutive lines: e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

This is vaguely comparable to what can be seen in acrostics in some medieval manuscripts (where of course the first letter of line N+1 depends on the first letter of line N according to the same rules with which words are formed in that language, often with vowels alternating with consonants). Of course, Voynichese line-start characters are too limited to be simple acrostics.

Again, I believe that these phenomena may provide vital insights into how the text was created, but I strongly doubt that they have anything to do with a hypothetical underlying text.