Atoms and elements of the Voynichese alphabet

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The proportional frequency relationship between "iir" and "iin" that you use as evidence for scribal error is not specific to this pair.

The proportionality is not between "iir" and "iin" but between ir, iir, iiir (1, 2, 3 i) and iin, iiin, iiiin (2, 3, and 4 i):

  ir   607  iin   4109
  iir  167  iiin   173
  iiir   2  iiiin    1

That is, frequency-wise -ir (n+1 is) is much more like -iin (n+2 is) than -in (n+1 is).

Those are the facts.  Scribal error because of visual similarity between in and r is my proposed explanation for those facts.

Every pair of similar frequently used words shows the same proportional relationship (see Timm 2014):

chedy (501) → lchedy (119) → olchedy (38) → qolchedy (10)
shedy (426) → lshedy ( 42) → olshedy (23) → qolshedy ( 2)

daiin (863) / dain (211)
daiir ( 24) / dair (106)
 aiin (469) /  ain ( 89)
 aiir ( 23) /  air ( 74)

chol  (396) / shol  (186)
cheol (172) / sheol (114)

Sorry, I don't see how those numbers support your claim (that similar words have similar or proportional frequencies).  If anything, they refute it.   For instance, by the numbers above, the ratio chedy : shedy is just ~1.2, but the ratio lchedy : lshedy is ~2.8.  

These proportional frequencies are explained by the observation that similar words co-occur within the same contexts in the Voynich text.

Even if these claims were correct, the second claim would not be an explanation for the first; it would be another observation, a detailing of it.  

Your proposed explanation is that the VMS text was generated by your proposed copy-and-mutate method, and the alleged proportionalities are a mechanical consequence of that. Well, as I wrote before, I see several problems with that theory.

All the best, --stolfi