Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens

[quimqu]

So, this is biasing your numbers. It should not surprise that hands 2 and 3 and quires 13 and 20 have better than expected probabilities of sharing these words.

I checked that possibility directly, because if the effect was mainly caused by scribal or by quire proximity, then most of the rare-token links should stay inside the same hand or the same quire.

I measured page-to-page links generated by semi-rare tokens (freq 2-10), and then checked whether the linked folios belonged to the same hand or quire. Global distribution:

Link type	Percentage
Cross-hand + cross-quire	59.4%
Same-hand + cross-quire	21.9%
Same-hand + same-quire	16.9%
Cross-hand + same-quire	1.7%

Then I checked the strongest section relationships specifically:

Section pair	Cross-hand	Cross-quire
Herbal ↔ Marginal stars	91.9%	99.8%
Biological ↔ Marginal stars	100%	100%
Herbal ↔ Biological	65.5%	100%

To clarify what the "100%" means here: it does not mean the sections are unrelated to scribes or codicology. In fact, part of the reason may be precisely that Biological and Marginal stars are mostly copied by different hands and appear in different quires. What it means is something different: the semi-rare tokens linking those sections are not staying inside local scribal clusters (hand or quire). The links themselves consistently jump across hand and quire boundaries instead of remaining local.

For example, some of the semi-rare tokens linking Biological and Marginal stars are:

Token	Biological folio	Marginal stars folio
alchl	f76v	f113r
cholchey	f79r	f113r
fshedy	f80r	f115r
cheety	f80r	f112r
ckhedy	f84r	f112v

If I am not wrong, those links are all cross-hand and cross-quire. So I agree there is definitely a codicological component here. But the strongest lexical bridges do not seem to be reducible to simple "same scribe / same quire" proximity either.