Similarity of Voynichese glyphs according to their immediate statistical environment

[quimqu]

I think my recent token-level results may help reconcile Mauro's and Timm's positions. If I am not wrong, Mauro measures global glyph distributions, while Timm argues that many substitutions are local and context-dependent. Instead of looking at glyphs, I looked at whole-word variants.

I built a dataset of token pairs at Levenshtein distance 1 and compared them against controls matched for frequency, length and line-position behaviour. Even after controlling for these factors, Lev-1 pairs still show significantly higher:

• section similarity
  
• page similarity
  
• paragraph similarity
  
• local context similarity
  

Metric	Control	Lev-1	Increase
Section similarity	0.520	0.645	+24%
Page similarity	0.081	0.158	+95%
Paragraph similarity	0.031	0.069	+123%
Context similarity	0.038	0.084	+121%

This suggests that similar words are not only visually related. They also tend to behave similarly within the manuscript. Interestingly, I also tested whether preserving prefixes is more important than preserving suffixes (or vice versa), and found very little difference. Both seem to preserve behaviour to a similar extent.

One detail I found particularly interesting is that some of the strongest relationships involve expansions rather than substitutions:

ain → aiin → aiiin
qokey → qokeey
shedy → sheedy

These variants tend to occur in very similar contexts. I don't think this proves a generative process, but it does suggest that these transformations are not random. They seem to preserve some aspect of token behaviour across the manuscript. The strongest signal I found is not generic visual similarity, but specifically the expansion series involving repeated i and e.

So my current impression is:

• Mauro is right that some substitution classes are not globally equivalent.
  
• Timm is right that many relationships are local rather than global.
  
• But there is also measurable evidence that small orthographic changes tend to preserve the functional behaviour of tokens (if there is one).
  

The remaining question is whether this reflects genuine morphology or a word-generation process of the kind proposed by Timm.