The origin of the base shapes of the Voynich alphabet

[Anton]

It's possible the shapes were chosen to resemble Latin.

The letters o, a, c (and c with tail), i (and i with tail, which resembles an r if the tail is at the top and a v if the tail is at the bottom) are all VMS glyphs that can be matched to Latin characters. Also the 9 and the bench char are common Latin abbreviations that fit the theme of curve shapes.

Even the gallows characters have analogs in Latin, especially the two-legged, one-loop gallows.


Now whether there's a linguistic or numberic schema behind them that includes some correspondence beyond the similarity and logic that may be inherent in the shapes is the big question.


The 4 x 17 page also includes four Greek letters in sequence, three of which fit the curve thema quite well (alpha, beta and gamma-with-a-tail) and one which is straight lines (delta), but the straight one is a rare character, the others are common, so maybe the curved ones were deliberately chosen for the main text.

I guess you did not understand quite well what I tried to express. It is: why pick "c" and "i" (this not a common "i", but "i" at an angle counter-clockwise) as base shapes among numerous other opportunities? Might they have been "borrowed" from somewhere?

One possible answer is that they resemble letters themselves. Not many other opportunities - I can think of the vertical (which actually seems to be used as well), dash, underscore, geometric shapes (circle, square, triangle, star) - not many of them resemble letters. And picking them as base shapes would make the text less "language-like". Imagine if a square were used for "с", and a triangle for "i".

But why would "i" be so strangely inclined leftwards?