At the end of his 2022 Malta Paper (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) Patrick comments on possible explanations for the patterns he discussed:
So, if the patterns do reflect structure in the underlying text, one possibility is that the line is indeed a functional unit, as in Virgil’s poetry, where sentences tend to begin at line start and end at line end (often on multiple lines, but the correlation is still highly significant). I don’t see other options for the structure we see to be an effect of structure in the underlying language. Personally, I find this scenario hard to believe, since the text is clearly formatted as medieval prose paragraphs.
The other example presented by Patrick is that of homophonic ciphers, so that an Ngram that is frequent on the left side of lines could encode the same plaintext sequence as another Ngram that is frequent on the right side: the original plaintext sequence would have a roughly constant frequency across line positions. More generally, if the scribe had different options for representing some plaintext sequences, he could have chosen among the options in a position-dependent way: we see this happen with Latin abbreviations, that in some manuscripts occur more frequently near the end of lines (though of course there are reasons to suspect that abbreviations do not play such a pervasive role in the VMS). The extreme case is that there is no underlying text, Voynichese is spontaneous gibberish (as discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and the author had total freedom to choose what to “write” (all structure is the effect of their personal preferences); given the overall consistency of the text, I guess that this scenario is easier to imagine with a single author whose output was copied by different scribes.
Patrick Feaster wrote:When it comes to explaining distribution patterns, there are various possibilities we might entertain. One is that each line of text corresponds to some unit of meaningfully patterned content, such as a grammatical sentence, a line of poetry, or an entry in a list. Exploratory studies of a few well-known works of poetry show that similar patterns can be detected in them, presumably due to a complex interplay of grammatical, metrical, and stylistic factors. In Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, if we compare homologous word pair sets ending [es] and [ibus], the [es] set has a midline average rightwardness score of 0.399 with 343 tokens, while the [ibus] set scores 0.708 with 390 tokens—a difference as stark as any presented above. Alternatively, we might hypothesize that distribution patterns arose as a byproduct of some method of encoding meaningful content rather than from the content itself. Here I’ll cite just one representative scenario. Fifteenth-century ciphers often sought to increase security by providing multiple options for encoding each plaintext character, and for this ploy to work as intended, a writer needed to alternate repeatedly among those options. One strategy for ensuring that happened would have been to favor different options in different areas of the page. Thus, there’s more than one angle from which we could try to explain distribution patterns, but the methods outlined above for identifying such patterns should be equally applicable to any and all prospective interpretations of them.
So, if the patterns do reflect structure in the underlying text, one possibility is that the line is indeed a functional unit, as in Virgil’s poetry, where sentences tend to begin at line start and end at line end (often on multiple lines, but the correlation is still highly significant). I don’t see other options for the structure we see to be an effect of structure in the underlying language. Personally, I find this scenario hard to believe, since the text is clearly formatted as medieval prose paragraphs.
The other example presented by Patrick is that of homophonic ciphers, so that an Ngram that is frequent on the left side of lines could encode the same plaintext sequence as another Ngram that is frequent on the right side: the original plaintext sequence would have a roughly constant frequency across line positions. More generally, if the scribe had different options for representing some plaintext sequences, he could have chosen among the options in a position-dependent way: we see this happen with Latin abbreviations, that in some manuscripts occur more frequently near the end of lines (though of course there are reasons to suspect that abbreviations do not play such a pervasive role in the VMS). The extreme case is that there is no underlying text, Voynichese is spontaneous gibberish (as discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and the author had total freedom to choose what to “write” (all structure is the effect of their personal preferences); given the overall consistency of the text, I guess that this scenario is easier to imagine with a single author whose output was copied by different scribes.