Voynich words evolve over a linear sequence

[JoJo_Jost]

Following up on my earlier post about the tables: I have now tested this against your sequence.

I entered your sequence (entries from the SVG export of the Sequence tab, 207 pages) into my tables and examined a single aspect: the ending after the root, i.e., chy / chey / chedy / cheedy, etc. The graph shows all words ending in -y, split by the ending (-y, -ey, -edy …) and the glyph before it (ch, sh, k, t …). In my own notation this is the table “State x Root” for key y.

The result was even more unambiguous than I had expected. The forms with a “d” after the “e” run (chedy, shedy, kedy, tedy, keedy, teedy) are practically nonexistent up to rank 124, i.e. the first 124 pages of your sequence (Herbal A, Pharma f87–f102, Astro f67–f70): 65 instances out of 4,215 “y” tokens. Starting at rank 125 (f46r), they appear immediately and together account for over a third of all y-tokens (3,978 out of 10,642). In between, I can’t detect any gradual increase. Pages like f99r, f101r, or f102v2 each have 30 to 40 “e-runs” and not a single “d”; the first pages after the jump immediately reach 60 to 85%.

I find two things about this important and interesting.

First, the new rows in the table duplicate existing ones. “chedy” is distributed across the preceding glyphs almost exactly like “chey” (ch/sh-heavy), and “cheedy” almost exactly like “cheey” (k-heavy). No new pattern emerges; rather, it’s a second spelling for an existing one. The bulk of this comes primarily from “chy,” which drops from 14% to 3%. No row or column disappears.

In short: To me, this looks like a cipher table that has been expanded, not like drift.

Second, and this is particularly intriguing: There is (at least) one page where the change occurs right in the middle of the page: f57r. The first paragraph (lines 1–5) has 13 forms ending in -eody and none ending in -edy, while the second paragraph (starting on line 6, which begins with a gallows) has none ending in -eody and 10 ending in -edy.
So was the table altered and then presented to the scribes in the middle of their work??? We don’t know, we don’t know.
This also fits your EODY_EDY rule exactly, if I understand it correctly—but not distributed across sections, rather at a paragraph boundary. “Lost leaves” can’t really explain this at this point, can they?

But I should be careful—your sequence is partly built from transitions that include “ed”, so the position of the jump is not independent. What is independent: the pages before it have really zero, not just few, and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows the switch within one page. So far, it’s just one key; I haven’t looked at the others yet. The 20 zodiac and ring pages without positions aren’t included either.