Dear Jürgen,
thank you for your response. Essentially, the "Polygraphia" hypothesis is based on the assumption that each token of the Voynich manuscript (VMS) is encrypting a single letter of an underlying clear text. To decipher the text the Voynichese words then must correctly be arranged in a table with 26 rows (corresponding to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet) and an unknown number of columns. This means the encryption is homographic, i.e., a particular cipher text word always decrypts to the same letter (but not vice versa). This way the encoded text depends on the plain text as well as on the code book. (Side note: Wouldn't this make it already hard to explain the observed patterns in line positioning (line as a functional unit)? Isn't the idea behind the cipher to prevent tells like frequently used words by using all the words in each row equally?).
To illustrate what I mean with my statement that the text is changing from page the following list contains the top frequency words for the pages f103r-f105v:
f103r qokeey (26), shedy (18), shey (15), chedy (11), qokeedy (10) ... chey (7) daiin (2)
f103v shedy (15), shey (14), ol (11), qokeey (11), chey (10) ... daiin (8) chedy (6)
f104r qokaiin (9), ar (8), okar (7), aiin (7), chol (6) ... daiin (5), chedy (5), chey (4), qokeey (1), shedy (1)
f104v chedy (10), aiin (10), cheey (7), ol (6), qokeey (5) ... daiin (4), chey (4), shedy (1)
f105r chedy (8), al (7), ar (6), or (5), daiin (5) ... chey (3), qokeey (1), shedy (1)
f105v aiin (14), daiin (13), otaiin (11), ar (7), al (6) ... chedy (3), chey (1)
The top frequency word for the pages You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. are <qokeey> and <shedy>. Both types are rarely used on f104r, f104v, You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and missing on f105v. However even if the top frequency words change from page to page all six pages have some words in common. For instance <daiin> as the most frequent word of the VMS occurs on every of the 6 pages but only on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. it is under the top 3 words. Another word occurring on each of these 6 pages is the <chey>.
If the code tables were indeed replaced for every page shouldn't we expect different set of code words along these changes and not only frequency changes? Maybe we could explain this observation by assuming that the code table was only partly replaced or that the words were chosen differently from the same code tablet. But how such a code tablet could result in the observed binomial word length distribution for types as well as for tokens? For the sake of the argument lets assume that the word length distribution within each code row was indeed binomial. Why words with average word length are used more frequently in the VMS? The scribe could choose any word and to reduce his effort I would expect that he maybe would prefer shorter words but not words of average length.
To the observation that words containing /ed/ are more common in Currier A than in Currier B. The following table list the number of tokens and types containing the glyph combination "ed".
"ed"-tokens total most frequent "ed"-types total most frequent
count in % tokens "ed"-types count in % types type
Herbal A 12 0.2% 8,087 1 12 0.5% 2499 403 daiin
Pharma A 17 0.7% 2,529 3 cheedy 15 1.4% 1113 99 daiin
Astro 28 1.3% 2,136 1 28 4.5% 620 12 daiin
Cosmo 257 9.5% 2,691 24 chedy 121 10.0% 1213 56 aiin
Herbal B 528 16.3% 3,233 62 chedy 182 14.4% 1263 73 or
Recipes B 2073 19.4% 10,673 190 chedy 517 16.7% 3093 193 aiin
Bio B 1925 27.8% 6,911 247 shedy 323 20.9% 1546 247 shedy
The table shows that also in Currier A word types containing "ed" exists. There are only a few "ed"-types and they are all rarely used. In Currier B on the other side words types containing "ed" are not only common, some of them are also frequently used. The type <chedy> only occurs twice in Currier A but represents the third most frequent word type in the VMS. This way the frequency counts confirm the general principle: high-frequency tokens also tend to have high numbers of similar words [see Timm & Schinner 2019, p. 6]. This observation indicates that a word like <chedy> was not introduced and then frequently used. Instead as <chedy> is used more and more frequently, this also increases the frequency of similar words, like <shedy> or <qokeedy>. But shouldn't we expect from the "Polygraphia" hypothesis that code words only depend on the encoded text and the code book and should therefore occur independently of each other?
This behavior happens since the VMS text is self similar. There are differences between Currier A and B. In the same way there are differences from quire to quire, from page to page, but also from paragraph to paragraph. And within a paragraph there are the paragraph initial gallow glyphs "p" and "f", and line initial (e.g. "d" and "s") and line final glyphs ("m"). This also repeats on word level with glyphs preferred in word initial and final position ("q" vs. "y").