Which other manuscript contain the most Voynichese glyphs?

[-JKP-]

Just an observation and a guess. 


If we trace how "o" is written in uppercase (marked with a red square), then we can assume that this is analogous to loops on the gallows. If the connecting line at the bottom has a loop, then this is "o"
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This comes from the Greek scribal conventions that were adapted by the Romans to fit common sounds/syllables in Latin.

In Greek, if you take Pi, for example, and add a small loop to the top-right, it represents "po" (and sometimes "pe"). This convention was incorporated into Latin, but was also understood as "is/em" if a tail was added to the loop.


By the 15th century, the "o" loop was disappearing and very few scribes made a distinction between an "o" loop (the double loop as in the above examples) and the "e" loop (with the single loop and a tail), so the shape of the tail in the "is" abbreviation no longer carried meaning, but the "is" convention remained right up until the 16th century.

Thus, the same shape in a 15th-century document can mean something different in a 13th-century document.


What I have found, though, from actually reading manuscripts, is that the more subtle abbreviations were rarely used. Most scribes picked 10 or so of the most common abbreviations and used those, and this seems to be true in both early and later medieval manuscripts and they are mostly the same, whether it's 12th century or early 15th century.


Wladimir, I hope you don't mind, but I wanted to point out how the loops can be interpreted in your example. Note that the single loops (the ones you have marked in blue and green) represent "e" or "i" in the examples to the bottom and left. The ones that represent "o" are actually double loops (I marked them so both loops are included, in red). This is somewhat scribe-specific (or sometimes word-specific) because, as one can see from the examples below in the top-right corner, a single loop was used in between letters to represent "o".




Also, in early medieval times, a shape that was sometimes drawn as double-cee and sometimes as Greek omega was often used to represent "u" (usually when it was associated with a "q") but it was typically superscripted rather than attached to the rest of the word.

You might also notice in the top right that there is a rather complicated abbreviation for "con". This was rarely used. Most scribes preferred the backwards cee or the EVA-y shape to represent "con" (easier to write and used less space).