The evolution of P/F vs T/K raises important questions

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It sounds like what you are saying, is the overall statistics are different because some classes of words are less desirable targets for puffing, and the desirable targets are mostly depleted, causing the mismatch?

That too.  Consider the digraph frequencies on newspaper headlines.  I am guessing that the frequency of "Th" at word-initial is very different from that of "th" as word-initial -- because the very common word "the" is never capitalized.  That would lead the Martians to conclude, incorrectly, that  "T" cannot be just a fancy version of "t" that Earthlings use to highlight the first line of each article.

But there is also the variation of word frequency with position on head lines, because of semantics.  In the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the word "Herba" occurs at the start of every entry. That causes the frequency of the digraph "rb" to spike at that location.  If the style was a bit different ("Accipiat eam" instead of "Accipiat de ista herba"), that word might not appear anywhere else.  Then the Martians might conclude that, in Terran herbals, the language used on the first line of each entry is different from the language of the other lines...

If there is some subset of desireable targets, we should be able to isolate that group and see that the JS divergence of the transition matrices are similar -- that would tell us that they are capable of forming roughly the same types of words at the same frequencies, and help confirm a match. If we can't find one -- then that would help us identify which type of puffing is occurring.  Would you agree with that?

Yes, I hope that we can eventually identify the "puffable" words, and what exactly the puffs are replacements for -- even before we can decipher the text.

But be warned that the answer to the second question may be disappointing.  Months ago someone posted on this forum an image of a Medieval document whose text was randomly sprinkled with fancy letters.  These were alarmingly similar to the Voynichese p/f, but more elaborate, with several loops and crossings. But it turned out that the shape of each fancy letter was not determined by the letter it replaced.  As if the scribe decided to play a "guess the letter" game with the reader.  Like "I HO♫E YO♥ AR♫ H♥VING L♥TS OF F☺N!"

I have a strong feeling -- but not certainty yet -- that qo- means "and", and is used as "wa-" in Arabic, "ve-" in Hebrew, and "we-" in Ge'ez.  That is, an enumeration like English "A,B, and C" in Voynchese would be "A qoB qoC". 

in this case, would that restrict the amount of words that it could be applied to over regular gallows?

Offhand, I don't see why. The words that such an "and" would be applied to could be adjectives, nouns, or verbs, like "black and blue spots" or "demons and miasmas" or "coughing and sneezing".  There would be some words that are never "and"-ed, like prepositions or keywords like "recipe:" or "caution:". 

I would love your opinion on this. These are the first lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- these would be adjacent interior sheets on the same bifolio. Look at this, the words are very similar.,

f20v: faiis,ar.okoy.shy,pofochey.opchy.qopy.choldy.opydy.cphy
f21r: pchor.o,eeockhy.o.fychey.ypchey.qopcheody.otaiin.chan

Indeed, ignoring spaces there is a very similar stretch

ofocheyopch*yqopych*oldy.opy
ofycheyypcheyqop*cheo*dy.ota

If we delete the "circles" [aoy] we get

fchepch*qpchldp
fchepcheqpchedt

which are identical, apart from two "errors" -- which would be the "error" rate that I currently estimate (up to 10% or more of the glyphs).  So that could be part of a text formula, or the same use for both plants.

Do you think this could be relevant? Or is it just coincidence?

A standard objection to "plain natural language" theories was that no natural language, including East Asian ones, had the same frequency of repetitions as Voynchese.

But when I proposed that the Stars section could be a transcription of the Shennong Bencao Jing (SBJ), someone objected that it could not be, because the SBJ had more repetitions than the Stars section. 

A particularly notable example of repetition was a sequence of 10 Chinese "words" (ideograms) that occurred twice in the SBJ.  That turned out to be a list of benefits that was the same for two tonics. 

All the best, --stolfi