The origin of the base shapes of the Voynich alphabet

[-JKP-]

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

I've been asking that question since I first saw the VMS and I don't have an answer, but I have found a small handful of manuscripts in which the stems are inclined backwards, perhaps for the same reason, perhaps for a different reason.

I suspect the ones I have seen in other manuscripts are inclined because they were written by left-handed scribes.


In the VMS, I suspect they may be inclined either because whoever developed the VMS glyph-set was accustomed to a different kind of alphabet OR because the inclination intentionally sets certain letters apart from traditional Latin letters. The inclination certainly looks very deliberate and is pretty much maintained throughout with only a small percentage of exceptions.