Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens

[Torsten]

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 interpretation that rare tokens connecting Herbal to Stars could be plant names appearing in recipes is plausible in principle. But several observations are difficult to reconcile with a semantic interpretation:

The specific tokens you listed as cross-section bridges look like modifications of common word families: 'fshedy' is 'shedy' with an 'f' prefix. 'ckhedy' is 'chedy' with a 'ckh' variant. 'cholchey' looks like a combination of 'chol' and 'chey.' 'cheety' is 'cheey' with an additonal 't'-gallow. To me they just look like modifications of common word families that happen to be rare because the specific modification was only produced a few times.

Some identical labels appear in both the herbal and the astronomical section: "okary," "oky," "otalam," "okeoly," "otaly," "otoky," "otaldy," "otal," "ykeody," "okeody," "okeos," "otory," "okody," and "oran" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 9). Labels are the most semantically constrained words in any manuscript — they should identify what they're attached to. One would not expect several stars or star constellations to be named after plants or parts of plants. If even the labels don't respect illustration boundaries, paragraph text connecting across sections doesn't need a semantic explanation either.

There is a continuous "ed" gradient across sections — from 0.23% in Herbal A to 27.84% in Quire 13. If words represent concepts, why would the vocabulary for describing plants, stars, and biological subjects shift systematically along a single axis? Different topics should produce different vocabularies — not the same vocabulary at different evolutionary stages.

The text lacks function words. In any meaningful text — regardless of language, cipher, or encoding — some words should distribute uniformly across all sections because they serve grammatical functions (conjunctions, articles, prepositions). No such words exist in the VMS. "Frequently used tokens differ from page to page" (Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 5).

The text contains almost no repeated phrases. Tiltman (1967), D'Imperio (1978), and Reddy & Knight (2011) all noted that sequences of three or more words virtually never repeat. Any meaningful text — descriptions of plants, recipes, instructions — produces repeated phrases ("take the root of," "boil in water," "apply to the"). The VMS doesn't.

The cross-section connections you found are real. But in my view they reflect the production process rather than semantic references — the same word families appearing wherever the scribe was working, regardless of what the illustrations depict.