The Impossibility of Double Gallows

[nickpelling]

Why does something have to be frequent to be "legitimate"? (...)

I don't think we should be too quick to dismiss variants of 4o as "copying errors" just because they are infrequent.

'legitimate' is your phrasing, not mine: I would expect that once we (somehow) get started cracking the Voynich's text, just about everything will ultimately turn to be meaningful, with the possible exception of line-initial EVA 's' (which I suspect is just the way the first column gets padded out sometimes - and please don't ask me why that should be the case, all I'm saying is how it looks to me).

At the same time, when we still don't even have anything approaching a high-level conceptual framework for all these marks to fit into, these 'diacritic'-like marks can add up to quite a heavy distraction. But really, the 99% of 'qo's that are just plain 'qo' are what need the real attention, because they are without much doubt central to The System, whatever The System is.

I don't quite agree with Helmut Winkler's view that the Voynich's relative lack of diacriticals is somehow unusual: but perhaps this is because I date the Voynich Manuscript to a few decades after the centre of the radiocarbon dating curve. By the 1460s (rather than the 1420s), the few remaining Tironian-style abbreviations were rapidly dying away, and were mainly being kept alive in monastic communities.