An Artificial Construction

[oshfdk]

Break it on <a> not <i>. The letter <i> in Pinyin can be a medial as well as a nuclear vowel, so it can appear in any of three central "slots". I wouldn't have expected <i> to act like Voynichese <k> simply because it's not being used consistently the way the slot alphabet model predicts

Use an encoding with tone numbers (e.g., mei2). This adds a tone slot and decreases the number of choices for the vowel slot by like a factor of 5, the net effect being it acts more like a Voynichese slot alphabet.

Thank you for the suggestions. First of all, two disclaimers:
1) the code to generate the charts was created by Codex, but it looks legit and the results look plausible, I'm fluent in Python
2) I had HSK3 level in Mandarin Chinese some ~20 years ago, so I used to be familiar with some 500+ characters (including the traditional and cursive ones, which I learned for fun) and pinyin and even though I forgot most of it, I think I generally know what I'm doing here
3) however, I don't treat this very seriously and don't double check everything, so if someone reproduces this would be nice

I fixed an error Codex made with the first version of the pinyin split by i where it wouldn't detect ì ǐ í ī as variants of i, so in the first chart I made only syllables like shuái and qiàn were processed, while píng and shì weren't. The fixed version is now the bottom left chart. Next to it is the pinyin split by a and pinyin split by a with numeric pinyin.

Note what while the Chinese graphs are whiter and have more cells closer to 1.0, they still show the natural random pattern with missing pairs and very low frequency pairs that is completely absent from the top 6 prefixes/suffixes in Voynichese. If we exclude the artificial cross lines made by ckh and chckh combinations from the Voynichese graph, the first prefixes/suffixes that show any significant deviation from random co-occurrence would have rank 7 or more, this doesn't happen in natural writing. I suspect that the evolution of natural languages would never perfectly balance characters or syllables in common words.

   

I cannot believe I'm about to say this as The Voynich Ninja's Most Vocal Chinese Theory Detractor™

The most vocal only because I stopped caring