Voynich Reconsidered

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And was that ever done systematically for all european languages of ~1400AD? Did you?

"European" languages generally have polysyllabic words.  That is the case for all the Indo-European languages, for the Finno-Ugrian ones (Finnish, Sami, Hungarian), and for all the "outliers" I know about, like Basque, Turkish, and Georgian.  If one plots how many words there are with K letters, one gets a plot with a long tail, stretching well beyond 10-12 letters.  The same letters may appear several times in a word, with similar contexts.

The structure of Voynichese words does not seem to allow polysyllabic words. There is a rather sharp limit on the length of the words.  There may be at most one gallows glyph in each word.  The other glyphs cluster around the "core" of the word in layers, according to rather limited patterns.  That structure is consistent with many East Asian languages, but not with any of the "European" ones above.

Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, and Ge'ez) generally have words with 3±1 syllables.   Some people have tried to match the Voynichese word structure that of those languages.  (Arabic script, in particular, uses different letter shapes at the beginning, middle, and end of a word; which suggests a way to get around the "one-gallows max" property of Voynichese.)  But AFAIK those attempts failed, because even 3±1 syllables  is too many.  

It is possible that Voynichese is an "European" language where each syllable is written as a separate word.  But I suspect that such a text would have the inverse problem: the "words" would be generally shorter and simpler than the Voynichese words...

All the best, --stolfi