Some letters aren't letters

[ReneZ]

In the following, let me use 'character' for the symbols we see in the Voynich MS.

I did use the term 'letter' (the second 'letter' in the thread title) to specifically refer to letters of an alphabet in the supposed plain text. Not to sounds or phonemes.

An example may help. The following figure is from Heidelberg CPG 597, an alchemical book from 1426. It has some encrypted passages. Some people will have seen this.

   

It says: "In dem namen des vaters und des suns und des heiligen geistes so fach ich schuldiger man dizes puch an".

We can reconstruct the table that the author used to encrypt this line.

This is not what happened in the Voynich MS, or at least  with the 5 or 6 characters that I highlighted.

Let's look at the case of f and p. Their special property is that they appear predominantly in first lines of paragraphs.

Here (and in general) it is important to approach it from the side of the author / encryptor.
If one looks at it from the side of the decryptor, one may simply do a substitution and end up with some plain text that has the property that some characters only appear in the top lines of paragraphs. This may not even be noticed.

However, for the encryptor, if he was working from a plain text, then this plain text would have already had the property that some characters appear in top lines only, which is not reasonable.

So, what could they be? The well-known example from Cappelli's dictionary gives one suggestion. These are embellishments. Thus f and p could also be embellishments, i.e. either elaborate forms of other characters, or the embellishments themselves, i.e. effectively nulls.
In both cases, we need to reduce the alphabet of Voynichese by two counts.

In this scenario it is possible, of course, that the author / encryptor was working from a handwritten plain text with such embellishments, and he used f and p to represent them.
(He wouldn't have been working from a printed plain text.....)

The case of these two characters is made even more interesting by the fact that they are happy to appear (in enlarged or embellished form) as first characters of paragraphs, and the number of different characters that appear in this position is so small, that they look more like pilcrows than real letters.
This may have some implications for the other characters that can appear here, notably k and t.