The top left hand loop of the gallows characters is a 4. Who disagrees?

[-JKP-]

JKP: Do you regard the "4" as in "4o" as being a "4" or not? If you do I can present my case that in a gallows character we have the same shape. If you don't think we can say that, do you think we can say what any Voynichese shape is?

Doesn't Occam's razor mean that we should assume it is a "4" shape before we assume it is a different shape that has been obscured? For example it could be a "z" shape or an "x" shape that has been heavily obscured, but presumably we shouldn't give that hypothesis nearly the same weight as that it is an unobsured "4" shape.

I read the q as a shape. That's all. A shape. Does the left part of t have the same shape? Yes. I've blogged about this, so obviously I have acknowledged the similarity.

Are they related? Maybe. If t is a ligature, maybe q is the left part of that ligature. And maybe not. Maybe the similarity in shape is part of some personal symbol system of the creator.

In Latin, the B and P have the same shape at the top, but they are not related meanings, they are only related shapes.

You don't seem to like the idea of it being obscured, but if it is a down-shifted left-part-of-t then it is somewhat obscured by shifting it and removing the right loop. I haven't suggested any strange obscurations like z or x, only the more natural or obvious ones, so I have not moved far from Occam's razor.

For example, here is similarity between q and y. Is it possible that q is a disguised y (might the scribe have unconsciously written EVA-q instead of EVA-y, or is it simply a mistake, or is something else going on)?



Also, notice the EVA-r on the first word, second line. I've often said this might not be "r" (many of the "solutions" assume it is "r"). In Latin this is not always "r", it is sometimes "i" with an "us" (y abbreviation) tail. You can see in this example, the "us/um" symbol is clearly written and clearly differentiated from the stem. This is how it is often written in Latin. Clearly the scribe was used to Latin scribal conventions. Things like this appear on almost every folio.