Mapping Voynich connections through rare tokens

[quimqu]

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Hello Torsten,

I agree that the repeated trigrams do not behave like normal linguistic phrases. Variable word order, low bigram predictability, and clustering of similar word forms are all observations that any explanation of the Voynich text must account for.

However, I think there are also observations that are difficult to reconcile with a purely local text-generation mechanism based on copying and modifying nearby words.

Recently I looked at tokens that appear in exactly one Herbal folio, but also occur elsewhere in the manuscript. The idea was simple: if Herbal folios represent individual plants, then any token restricted to a single Herbal folio but reused in other sections might be functioning as a plant identifier or some other folio-specific concept.

The results were surprisingly widespread (in this table I show the number of tokens per section that appear in just one page of the section and then appear in other sections):

Section	Candidate tokens	Section vocabulary	% vocabulary
Astronomical	297	614	48.4%
Text-only	449	995	45.1%
Cosmological	439	1126	39.0%
Zodiac	287	784	36.6%
Pharmaceutical	409	1162	35.2%
Biological (balneological)	427	1480	28.9%
Marginal stars only	654	3339	19.6%
Herbal	620	3490	17.8%

In total I found 620 such tokens for herbal vocabulary.

Even more interesting, these 620 tokens are distributed across 117 of the 125 Herbal folios (almost all of them). On average, each Herbal folio contributes about 5 such tokens, and some folios contribute as many as 19.

A few examples:

Code:

qotey -> Herbal f4r, also found in Stars and Balneological chetey -> Herbal f34r, also found in multiple non-Herbal folios olchedy -> Herbal f26r, reused outside Herbal

(The exact examples are not important. The general pattern is.)

What I find difficult to explain is not the existence of these words, but their distribution. These tokens are restricted to a single Herbal folio, yet they reappear in multiple folios belonging to completely different sections.

If the text is generated primarily through local copying and word-family variation, why do so many folio-specific words propagate across section boundaries while remaining restricted to a single Herbal folio?

This observation does not prove that the words have meaning, nor that they are plant names. But it seems to suggest that at least some lexical items are linked to individual Herbal folios and then reused elsewhere in the manuscript in a non-local way.

I would be interested to hear how your generation model accounts for this pattern.

(Just a quick note: myborevious studies led me to a generation model, but these findings are hard to explain with that kind of models).