Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens

[quimqu]

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.

I think we may be looking at the problem from slightly different angles.

My point is not that rare-token links disprove vocabulary evolution. They probably don't. What interests me is that these semi-rare tokens often connect sections that, under a semantic interpretation, could plausibly be related.

For example, in a normal herbal manuscript, semi-rare words might be plant names. You would expect them to appear on the herb page itself, but also in recipes or remedies referring to that plant.

What I find interesting in the Voynich is that some of these semi-rare tokens connect Herbal folios with Marginal Stars folios. If the Stars section contains something recipe-like (which is of course only a hypothesis), then that is exactly the kind of pattern one might expect from a meaningful text.

The hand argument is also interesting here. Many of these links cross scribal boundaries. So the connection is not simply that one scribe tends to reuse his own rare vocabulary. The same semi-rare forms appear in sections copied by different hands.

Of course this does not prove meaning. But if rare vocabulary repeatedly links Herbal pages with possible recipe-like pages (or even Balneological pages with recipe-like pages), I think that is at least worth investigating further.