The origin of the base shapes of the Voynich alphabet

[Anton]

Yes that process is reversible. All con scripts are constructed this way. What other way would be imaginable?

I guess you miss my point. Let me illustrate it by means of example. Consider Voynichese c. For the sake of this thread, I argue that this glyph is "invented" (that is, designed and included into the Voynich alphabet) by combining e and dash. The dash being appended as a tail modifier to e yields c. Likewise, dash being prepended to e as a head modifier yields h. And so forth.

We don't know if this is the way the Voynich alphabet was actually derived, but, once again, for the sake of this thread I pre-suppose that it is.

What other way is imaginable, you ask. Consider the Latin alphabet. There are letters "с" and "l". There is also letter "d". Is the letter "d" composed out of letters "c" and "l"? No, it is not. It is a letter on its own. It is just accidental that its shape resembles shapes of letters "c" and "l" combined together. At least, unless there is something that I don't know of in the origins of the Latin alphabet.

Again, there is no such thing. It is either a cipher or a writing system.

You confuse two things here. A cipher is just a set of rules to obtain ciphertext from the incoming plain text. It is matter of encoding, not the matter of which letters (or other signs) are used to convey the code. One and the same ciphertext can be written down by using symbols of Latin alphabet, of Cyrillic alphabet, whatever. (Just the size of the alphabet needs to be sufficient). Hence I clearly separate the alphabet from the writing which it actually conveys. The writing can be an enciphered text in a known language, a plain text in an unknown language, a plain text in an artificial language, or just even nonsense.

These are not primitives. A circle can be constructed by two curves, one mirrored and translated.

Whether they are primitives or are not - depends on the designer of the alphabet exclusively, on whether he does treat them as primitives or does not. If he treats them as primitives, this just means that, within his alphabet, they are not decomposed in anything more "primitive" than themselves.