Similarity of Voynichese glyphs according to their immediate statistical environment

[Torsten]

About the 'shared base strokes': it's true of course that VMS symbols are constructed with just a few of them, but I've never been conviced of the significance of this fact because I find it rather expected that any writing system will tend to re-use the same basic strokes. Ie. in the normal block letters Latin alphabet 'o', 'p', 'q', 'b', 'd', 'l' are all made with a circle (or none)+ a vertical bar (or none), but this does not mean they are related to each other.

Whether other writing systems reuse the same basic strokes — that is actually the point: the VMS behaves differently. For instance the shape of a glyph must be compatible with the shape of the previous one, and is also influenced by its position within a word or a line. Schwerdtfeger described in 2008 four design rules: (1) line-glyphs can follow line-glyphs or 'a'; (2) curve-glyphs and 'a' can follow curve-glyphs; (3) the 'l'-glyph can be used as a curve-glyph or as a line-glyph; and (4) gallows glyphs count as curve glyphs (see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 10). See also the description of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Brian Cham from 2014.

In the Latin alphabet, "p" and "b" share a circle + bar but have completely different distributional contexts. In the VMS, your measurements show that glyph pairs sharing stroke structure — ch/sh (0.13), k/t (0.09), p/f (0.11) — have nearly identical distributional contexts. Visual similarity predicts distributional interchangeability. That relationship doesn't exist in writing systems encoding natural language. However, it does exist in the Voynich text.