Decomposition of the "gallows" characters

[Sam G]

This is an interesting discussion in itself, so I decided to open a separate thread.

This thought occurred to me right after reading Cham's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the "Curve-Line system" which, among other things, makes accent on how some Voynich characters can be decomposed into more elementary characters - the basic e or i and one of the possible "tail modifiers" - an idea generally expressed earlier by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

It appears that the gallows can well be decomposed in a similar way (please excuse awkward graphics, I'm not a professional web designer):

The "Frogguy" transcription alphabet developed by Jacques Guy in the early 90's decomposed gallows in precisely this way:

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All four plain gallows result from combining either EVA "q" or the vertical line with one of the two tail modifiers (marked as t1 and t2). Note that these tail modifiers, when combined with elementary e or i, mostly yield valid Voynichese characters:

• e + t1 = d
  
• e + t2 = g
  
• i + t1 = z (?)
  
• i + t2 = m
  

The only point of question here is the third expression. "z" is a valid character that is encountered, though rarely, in the VMS, but in contrast to i which is normally at a 45 deg. angle, z is perpendicular to the baseline. So it is not clear whether z is really meant to be a combination of i and t1.

The character you've labeled <z> is actually EVA <j>, and it is quite rare, but it does show up.  I've wondered if the scribe (who I think was a copyist) had trouble distinguishing between <d> and <j>, and if there should actually be more instances of <j> in the text.