Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs?

[-JKP-]

I'm actually working on some maps, but as interesting as they are, the gallows are probably not the best characters to use for paloegraphical comparisons, at least not at first. The more mundane "a" and "o", which were probably written the same way in VMS as they were in the scribes' local (or familiar) language, are more likely to yield clues to the writers' origins and daily habits.



Plus gallows characters take longer to study. I think there are more than four basic forms (plus benched forms). That doesn't automatically mean the variations differ in meaning (they might not, but it won't be clear without statistical studies).

It's not usually acknowledged in transcripts that there are many different forms of gallows, including one that is consistently written like EVA-k EXCEPT that the crossbar is on top (not slightly down the stem) and the loop slightly raised, and one that looks like EVA-k mirrored (the loop is on the left). It is also not usually acknowledged in transcripts that there are so many different forms of benched gallows: half gallows, cross-the ascender gallows, triple gallows, and extra-letter under the gallows bench that doesn't touch the bench.

I think I already posted a version of this chart on the forum and I haven't had time to add to it for a while, but here are some basic observations about VMS gallows when I investigated them to see if the forms could be organized into categories:



Here are some important things to notice in this chart...

• If you look very closely at the variations, it suggests the possibility that P-shaped gallows may not have started out as P shapes. If you take EVA-k (which is a common scribal shape) and bench it, and shorten the leg on the right (row 8, col. 8), it's almost a benched P. The internal consistency of the gallows constructions suggests the possibility that the designer may have started with one or two more common shapes which, in turn, inspired the less common ones.
  
• It is particularly important to notice that P shapes have the little loop ON THE RIGHT. This detail is never discussed, but I think it's very important. No one writes P this way (I looked at hundreds of alphabets)—the little loop is almost always on the left—even medieval calligraphic pees rarely have a little loop on the right. But little loops on the right DO occur with significant frequency in scribal conventions where the loop is added as an abbreviation. This, along with other clues suggests, once again, that the gallows and benched gallows might not be glyph characters, they may be combinations of scribal shapes, and they may not be inspired by any particular alphabet outside of Latin, they may be a SYSTEM of glyph combinations, as was true of the entire scribal-abbreviation system—once you learn a few basics, you can combine them any way you like.
  
• It has been said that gallows characters are never adjacent in the VMS. This isn't true, plus I suspect some of the adjacent ones have been "hidden" in a sense, by combining them. Some of the fancy gallows appear to be embellished, but SOME of the combinations look like they have been stacked (see the last column in the chart). I think the one top right is a benched version of EVA-k followed by EVA-p. The one just below it, in row 2, looks like unbenched versions of EVA-k followed by EVA-p. But look at the next one, in the third row, the p-shape is above the k shape, not to the right of it, it is stacked differently, so perhaps in this instance, it represents Eva-p followed by EVA-k, instead of the other way around. Everything about the VMS glyph set is systematic. This too suggests that it's a set constructed by someone with an orderly mind. Considering how much of the VMS alphabet already is Latin characters and Latin scribal conventions, including positional similarity to Latin scribal conventions, the less common shapes may simply be constructed of more common ones combined to suit the designer's needs.