Beyond Language: Order-Invariant Structure in the Voynich Manuscript

This preprint presents a quantitative structural analysis of the Voynich Manuscript based on cumulative edit-distance measurements over token sequences. Using established scholarly transcriptions, the study shows that token production throughout the manuscript is overwhelmingly constrained to exact reuse or small character-level modifications of previously attested forms. This bounded edit-distance repairability is present from the earliest folios, persists across later structural regimes associated with the bigram ed, and remains stable under random folio shuffling. The results demonstrate that the manuscript operates as a globally self-connected lexical system whose structural coherence does not depend on folio order or progressive accumulation. These findings place strong constraints on viable generative models of the Voynich text and motivate further comparative analysis against natural languages, ciphers, and constructed systems. This version is released as a preprint to establish provenance. Additional baseline comparisons and statistical analyses are in progress.