Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[MarcoP]

Thank you npcompl33t, I find the subject very interesting!

In my opinion, there's much wasted space in the images in post #1: if empty horizontal space could be removed, maybe the graphs would be easier to read.
Also, I would prefer to see rules listed and discussed in the forum post, rather than at an external page that I expect will change in the future.

if words truly lacked semantic meaning, there would be no reason why chol could not just simply gradually vanish with no replacement.

I am not sure I understand what is being said here. "replacement" is a theory, one can see the same phenomenon as “gradually vanishing”. It seems you are drawing an inference from an assumption that may or may not be correct.

Also, I am not sure the inference is correct by itself. Why cannot meaningless words gradually turn into different but similar meaningless words? Gaskell and Bowern found that spontaneous written gibberish has highly variable features: not much can be excluded a priori. In particular they found that, when compared with ordinary text, Voynichese “adjacent words are [less] different from one another relative to the average” (very low wordchange_mean), and this can also happen in spontaneous gibberish. This small-scale observation may be related with the greater shifts we observe on longer parts of the text. The samples they checked are too small to observe a substantial drift, but I don’t think we can safely assume that it wouldn’t happen.

EDIT: Maybe a detailed discussion of a limited set of words, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., would also make the theory easier to understand.