The Impossibility of Double Gallows

[nickpelling]

If qo were a coherent entity (and ONLY supposed to be a biglyph), then I don't think the macron glyph-shapes would have been added next to q in several places (if the VMS macron has the same function as in Latin languages, then it represents omitted letters between q and "o").

If the macron-like overbar is typical of those used in the fifteenth century, it indicates that the letter following (not preceding) the o has been omitted / nasalized / whatever. So my own suspicion (before even The Curse of the Voynich) was that this might be a case where the writing system had somehow placed EVA o after word-initial EVA qo-, and so what we may well be looking at in those  cases was a contracted EVA 'qoo'.

However, whatever is going on with the macron-like bar over the o in qo in those very few instances (aren't there just two in the entirety of the VMs corpus? You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and one other?), it's a very small sample to be using to try to draw inferences about the overall writing system.

For what it's worth, my various estimates for the scribal error rate (e.g. when aiin ends up oiin, etc) all sit relatively consistent at about one mistake per line of text, which makes me pretty comfortable with the suggestion that EVA qo is a genuine bigram and that the remainder of the q[^o] pairs are scribal copying errors.