Structural Regularities in the Voynich Manuscript: Evaluating the Tironian Shorthand Hypothesis through Constraint-Based Analysis

This paper presents a formal statistical characterization of the structural properties of the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408), focusing on the internal logic of the Pharmaceutical and Herbal sections. We identify a set of robust computational constraints—including a rigid prefix-root-suffix morphology and a systematic "herbal-to-pharma" substring composition system—that define the manuscript’s unique textual architecture. These regularities are evaluated against the hypothesis of a personalized Tironian shorthand system. While the observed patterns are shown to be theoretically compatible with such a framework of professional abbreviated notation, we present this as a heuristic model for structural comparison rather than a definitive linguistic identification. Furthermore, we document several candidate ingredient strings that, while currently below the threshold for statistical certainty, provide necessary test cases for future cross-corpus validation. By establishing these data-driven constraints, this work aims to narrow the search space for the manuscript’s functional nature.