The origin of the base shapes of the Voynich alphabet

[-JKP-]

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That mightn't be too clear.  Let me give an example.  If you've never learned to write Chinese characters, then when you try to do it, it is natural to define what you see by breaking it down into things most like what you are used to writing.  So you'll define this element as 'a comma' and another as 'o' or 't with a crossbar'... and compile the figure in that way.. Your hand knows how to write 'comma' and 't' and so forth, and writing relies on muscle-memory quite as much as on what the eye sees.

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It was clear the first time.


Having looked at every glyph in the manuscript at least three times when I was creating my transcript, I observed that the most naturally-written glyphs in the VMS, the places where the pen seems to stutter and hesitate the least, tend to be  EVA-y, the tail at the end of EVA-daiin, and, most of the time, EVA-ell and EVA-o. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us much about the scribes' native scripts, since these shapes are common to many slphabets, including Latin, Greek, Arabic, etc.


I agree that these are scribes who write cursive rather than book hands. Those trained in book hands have quite different habits and the VMS scribes don't even hold the pen at the right angle to write book hand. One can learn book hand shapes (the marginalia on the last page has a combination of cursive and book shapes but decidedly does not have a book hand style) without necessarily being able to put them together in the right way for the result to be a book hand. The VMS scribes either don't know book hand style or probably aren't any good at it. Holding the pen correctly is the first thing one learns so that the thick and thin shapes are in balance and distinctive from one another, which is not the case in the VMS.


The "tick", the foot on the base of the ascenders is significant, however. I've spent years trying to figure out if it's meaningful because in some of the alphabets I've repeatedly mentioned in blogs, the tick, the "foot", adds to or changes the meaning of the letter, but... the added foot doesn't appear to follow any logical patterns in the VMS that I can tell so far.


However, if the tick mark is not meaningful in the linguistic sense, then it becomes very meaningful in the provenance/history-of-the-scribes sense, because if it's not meaningful in terms of altering how we are supposed to comprehend the ascenders (gallows) and some of the EVA-r glyphs, then it's a "tell" signal that the scribes may have been used to adding a tick in their native script because there would be no reason whatsoever for someone who WASN'T used to writing the tick to add "extra work" or to invent a foot to add to an encrypted glyph by adding a meaningless and very small tick. The ascenders are distinguishable from one another without the tick.


I'm also of two feelings about this because even though I'm fairly sure the tick on the ascenders does not denote a different character/meaning, it seems as though the tick on EVA-ell MIGHT. I am really not sure. It's another one of those drives-you-crazy details (NATVIEE–nothing about the VMS is ever easy) that's difficult to sort out.


In terms of line and letter spacing, the VMS script seems closer to Greek miniscule than most other forms but I don't know if this is an aritfact of writing in an unfamiliar script (encoded scripts often do not look like the person's normal handwriting) or because it's characteristic of the scribes' native script.