Why and how the text could be Bavarian

[JoJo_Jost]

Forbidden Spaces in the Voynich Manuscript

To gain a slightly better understanding of which bigrams, trigrams, etc., belong together, I asked myself which glyphs are never separated by spaces. No wonder - this pattern is just as regular as the one involving spaces, and of course it stems in part from it. Nevertheless, I found the analysis interesting - sorry for the very, very long image.

I analyzed the spacing behavior in the VMS at the level of atom pairs (adjacent atoms within lines). The corpus contains 168,004 such atom pairs, based on the EVA-Z3b.

All glyph/atom pairs (a, b) within lines were counted
Inclusion threshold: n >= 50 occurrences and P(space) < 5%
The qualifying pairs were grouped into structurally coherent families

Result:

118,165 out of 168,004 glyph neighborhoods are strongly bound (70.3% of the corpus)
These are distributed across only 18 families covering various structural roles:

Token-end building blocks (aiin, edy, ee, vowel+m)
ch-initial, sh-initial, simple gallow+filler, bench gallow+filler
Token-initial blocks (qo, o-initial, d-initial, p/f-initial)
Connecting elements (vowel+r, vowel+l, e-connector, h-connector)

What this means
Here, everyone can let their imagination run wild. What is clear, however, is that the structure is very rigid. 

The really interesting question remains: how could one achieve such consistency?

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

 
   

Note: Many of the building blocks mentioned here (aiin, qo, edy, ee, che/she, Gallow clusters) have, of course, already been documented in earlier works—such as in Stolfi’s *Grammar of Voynichese* (2000), Feaster’s analyses, and various bigram studies. What this analysis adds is an explicit counterpoint to Feaster’s spacing rules: a systematic catalog of atom pairs where spaces are prohibited (P(space) < 5%), grouped into 18 structural families and quantified based on the corpus.