Rotating decoration on gallows f42v

[ChenZheChina]

By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

If they are simply letters of words, the grammar of the underlying language might have an unusual structure or unusual habit.

Consider this (copied from Wikipedia):

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

If we expect the subject noun to be the first word, it should have more variety, instead of most-times-gallows. I don’t know if there is any language that mark the noun as subject by adding a prefix. If that is the case, the initial letter might do have less variety than we expected.

However, there are something else we could expect to be the first word. For example, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In this case, we could expect pages to begin with same words:

Being a West Germanic language, English was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

Please keep in mind that, though being a standalone word in English, copulae may not be standalone in Voynich language, and might be a prefix as well.

Another example is “first”:

First spoken in early medieval England, English is a Western Germanic language that eventually became a global lingua franca.

Using “first” as the first word would not be that strange, if contents of each topic begins from introducing the object’s history. Same thing might happen here, that “first” may be a prefix instead of standalone word, though such thing is less likely to happen. I personally do not know any language that expresses “first” as a prefix or something, but I can’t say impossible.

Also, there are still other possibilities. For example, maybe some of them are common phrases that frequently present at beginning of paragraphs, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

EDIT: Add explanation about copula and “first” might be prefixes. Thanks to MarcoP.