[Article] The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

[Torsten]

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You describe four systems that vary, but each has a stable core: a cipher that exists before being refined, a homophone table with shifting preferences, a fixed humoral ordering, a stable German with spelling variation. Remove the variation and the system remains.

The Voynich text is different. The change is not variation around a stable system — it is a directional shift. Word families like ⟨chol⟩/⟨chor⟩ dominate the early sections but decline in frequency as new families like ⟨chedy⟩/⟨shedy⟩ rise, with documented intermediate forms along the way. New word families like ⟨qokedy⟩/⟨qokeedy⟩ emerge that have no counterpart earlier in the manuscript. Even new glyphs appear: ⟨m⟩ is absent from early herbal folios and becomes frequent later. That is not substitution preferences shifting over a stable vocabulary — it is the vocabulary and the writing system themselves expanding in one direction.

This predicts a testable difference. In each of your four models, normalizing the variation should recover the stable core — the cipher table, the plaintext language, the humoral categories. For the Voynich, nobody has succeeded in doing this, despite decades of attempts. The self-citation model explains why: there is nothing stable to recover.