The Origin of [sh]

[nickpelling]

I've thought a lot about ch vs sh: the key problem seems to be that the plume of sh is rendered in so many ways through the Voynich Manuscript's pages that it seems likely that you can find numerous counterexamples to just about any constructive theory you can put together about how they they were supposed to be constructed.

At a slightly more fundamental level, I don't believe that anyone has yet done a microscopic study of the letters in the different section to work out in which precise order different hands assembled strokes into letters. My suspicion is that each of the hands has a fairly consistent way of writing Voynichese letters, but that this breaks down when they miscopy things (e.g. when they start copying sh as ch, and then have to fix it up etc), but it would be much better if we just knew this kind of thing in a codicologically definitive way.

The area I was pretty sure in 2006 that I caught one of the Voynich hands specifically assembling letters in different passes was on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (Curse pp.164-168), where it seemed (and indeed still seems) to me that the aii- groups were written first before the -n flourish was added as a second pass (in a different ink). But that's a separate story.