Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens

[Torsten]

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

A note on one of your examples. In the Takahashi transcription there is only one instance of "alchl" — on f113r. On f76v, Takahashi reads "ralchl" as one word, while the transcription you used probably reads it as "r" + "alchl." So whether the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. link exists depends for rare tokens on which transcription you use and how you interpret a word boundary. With tokens appearing only twice, a single transcription disagreement can create or destroy a cross-section connection.

But the broader picture is actually more interesting than the exact-match network captures. The sequence "lchl" is rare — only seven instances in the entire manuscript (Takahashi):

Folio	Token	Section
f76v	ralchl	Biological
f77r	dolchl	Biological
f81r	lchl	Biological
f105r	lchl	Marginal Stars
f106r	rarolchl	Marginal Stars
f107r	polchls	Marginal Stars
f113r	alchl	Marginal Stars

These are not seven unrelated words that happen to share a character sequence. They are variants of the same form — "ralchl," "dolchl," "alchl," "polchls," "rarolchl" — each differing from the others by prefix addition or substitution. They form a word family connected through the same modification operations visible throughout the VMS vocabulary.

And their distribution — three in Biological, four in Marginal Stars — confirms the connection you found between these two sections. But it also illustrates the general point: the similarity between Voynich words is the text's most characteristic feature. Looking for exact token matches misses the family structure. "alchl" and "ralchl" are different tokens but members of the same "lchl"-family. A network built on word families rather than exact matches would capture more of the manuscript's real structure.

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.

I think this is an important observation. The rare-token links don't cluster by hand and they don't cluster by illustration type. If the text described the illustrations, we would expect rare vocabulary to cluster by illustration type — plant-related terms on herbal pages, star-related terms on star pages, biological terms on biological pages. That's not what we see.

If different scribes wrote different sections, we would expect rare vocabulary to cluster by hand — each scribe's idiosyncratic word choices staying within that scribe's sections. That's not what we see either.

What we do see is that the strongest connections follow the "ed" frequency gradient: Herbal A (0.2 %) → Pharma A (0.7 %) → Astro (9.5 %) → Herbal B (17%) → Marginal Stars / Quire 20 (19.4%) → Biological / Quire 13 (27.8%). Sections that are adjacent in this gradient share the most rare vocabulary — regardless of hand, regardless of illustration type, regardless of quire boundaries. This is what I would expect if the vocabulary evolved continuously through the production of the manuscript [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].