Voynichese's letters

[ReneZ]

You could as well start with an empty dictionary. (To the Author with no computers, finding the 400 most common words would be a lot of extra work, with no obvious necessity). 

Well, they would not have to be THE 400 most common words. Just common words would do it.
And I agreee that, the smaller the number, the larger the effect.
Doing a dummy start page and throwing it away is another way of achieving largely the same.

In any case, the purpose of this exercise at the time was to show that the effect noted by Torsten Timm, and used as evidence for the autocopy theory, can also arise with this straightforard method of encoding a known plain text. If I remember correctly, the effect in my sample text still exceeded the magnitude found in the Voynich MS.

But all this is not the purpose of the present thread...