About the generation of similar words

[Torsten]

So, the structure looks more like a local space of related forms than a linear chain of derivations.

Your observation that "tokens do not seem to be anchored to a single dominant neighbor" and that "the system behaves more like a cloud than a chain" matches the findings in my 2016 paper "Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The paper contains two-dimensional heat maps showing the probability that a word at position {n,m} is identical or similar (edit distance 1 and 2) to words at every surrounding position. The pattern is symmetric — similarity increases toward the current position from all directions, not just from the left. The strongest similarity is at {n-1,m} (same position, previous line) and {n,m-1} (previous position, same line), but the entire neighborhood is elevated.