Atoms and elements of the Voynichese alphabet

[Torsten]

...

The parallel frequency distributions of "ir"/"iir"/"iiir" and "iin"/"iiin"/"iiiin" are real — but they don't require scribal error as explanation. Similar word endings behave similarly throughout the VMS. The same parallel distribution exists for every pair of similar suffixes — "-ol"/"-or"/"-al"/"-ar", "-edy"/"-eedy"/"-ey"/"-eey", "-ain"/"-aiin"/"-air"/"-aiir". In each case, the frequency of one variant predicts the frequency of the other. That is a universal property of the text, not evidence for misreading in one specific case. 

Regarding the ratios: I did not claim exact constant ratios. I claimed that similar words have predictable frequencies — "if it is known that 'chedy' is frequent, it is possible to predict that 'shedy' is also frequently used although less frequently than 'chedy'" (Timm 2014, p. 6). The ratio chedy : shedy (1.2) differs from lchedy : lshedy (2.8) — but the direction is overall that "sh" forms are less frequent than corresponding "ch" forms. The specific ratios vary because there is only an indirect relation between similar word types - similar words are products of the same word family operating in the same production environment -  and because low-frequency words fluctuate more — at 119 and 42 instances, a few extra copying events would shift the ratio substantially.

And yes, co-occurrence is an observation — but it is an observation that constrains the explanation. If similar words co-occur on the same pages (+95% page similarity over frequency-matched controls, as quimqu recently measured for Levenshtein distance 1 pairs), then their frequencies will naturally correlate because they are produced in the same local context. The question is: why do similar words co-occur? That is what the production model answers.

And no, the alleged proportionalities are not a mechanical consequence of the self-citation method. It is the other way around. The self-citation method is the most compact description of all the properties we can observe in the Voynich text.