A One-Page Ledger Method for Generating Voynich-Like Text

[Dunsel]

I don't think this shows anything at all. Voynichese is quite regular: the number of common characters is small and their sequences are quite rigid. Most of the vocabulary has many ED1 words. This is a property of the word structure. Let's ask a different question, how many words on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. have only one ED1 source on f1r, so they can be traced to a single source? Also, I don't understand the rationale for stripping the gallows, this looks like a cheap trick.

I think you're focusing on a different question than the one I'm testing.

If the claim were simply that many Voynich words have ED1 neighbors, I would agree that this is not very interesting. Given the character inventory and regular word structure, ED1 relationships are expected. The purpose of the provenance test is not to show that an ED1 source exists somewhere in the manuscript. The results are showing that after same-page copy/mutate are removed, the remaining source words repeatedly collapse into a very small number of sheets as the source of those pages. I can easily imagine a scribe with a completed sheet in front of them and using that as the source for the page they're working on. That is what the evidence is pointing to.

As for gallows stripping, that was done because gallows are overwhelmingly productive in prefix positions. If gallows behave as a frequent prefix operation rather than as ordinary internal characters, then treating chol, kchol, tchol, etc. as completely unrelated forms obscures rather than reveals the family structure.  Whether that assumption is justified is certainly open to discussion, but it was not introduced simply to manufacture matches. Thus far, I do not believe many researchers have seriously considered the possibility that gallows may function primarily as a decorative addition rather than as a core lexical element. I am testing whether they might be. If removing the gallows destroys the structure, then the hypothesis fails. If removing them reveals stable word families, source relationships, and copy/mutate chains that remain consistent across pages, then that is evidence that the gallows may not be carrying the same kind of information as the rest of the word. So far, stripping gallows has not weakened the provenance results. If anything, it has made the underlying relationships easier to see. So, perhaps the cheap trick is not mine to claim. Perhaps gallows is a cheap trick of the scribes' invention.

Your question about how many words on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. have only a single ED1 source is a reasonable one, but it is a different test from the provenance analysis shown above.