Liaisons in the Voynich text

[quimqu]

Hello Tavie!

I don't remember Marco and Emma's work on yk after an image - do you have a link?  It sounds interesting.  

It's Marco's thread from 2019, "Lines interrupted by drawings": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (posts #10, #11 and #18). Emma asked what came after the y in the words right after an image break, and Marco found that yt- and yk- are very frequent there, while a bare gallows almost never starts a word after a break. That is the "y before a gallows, after a gap" case of what I describe.

Here's a post where she suggests certain glyphs like o are being inserted to avoid certain word break combinations.

Thanks, I didn't know those posts. So Emma already had the o and the q cases back in 2017, just said with strong and weak glyphs instead of forbidden pairs. The d and the y, the link with the inside-word pairs and the spacing I think are still new, but "new rule" was too much, maybe, I agree.

can we distinguish a general aversion to these glyphs being close from the influence of positional constraints?

For n and m you're right, inside words there are too few cases to say anything. But the rule doesn't rest on them, rk and dk have plenty of chances inside words and are rare anyway. And the real test is between words, where position plays no role: after a word ending in n, the next gallows word takes an o or a y almost always; after a word ending in l, much less. If n.k were missing just because n is always final, there would be no reason for that.

[quimqu]

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[nablator]

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