Is [a] always [a]?

[RenegadeHealer]

Great thread on a well-loved but not frequently well-articulated topic, Koen. The [aiin] series have always been my favorite element of Voynichese, and I suspect I'm not alone in this. They're unique in a number of ways that are highly interesting, particularly:

• Occurrence almost exclusively at the end of a vord, without a corresponding strong preference for the end of a line
  
• A variable number of middle elements, with the beginning and ending elements typically uniform
  
• Strong resistance to being parsed as a definite number of independent glyphs, making them the bane of transcription and statistical analysis attempts.
  

Ideas I can get behind, given what we know currently:

• [aiin] is one character. So are [ain] and [aiiin]. The occurrence of [air] and [aiin] in strings of otherwise isolated glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f57v, respectively, is good evidence of this.
  
• [ain], [aiin], and [aiiin] are highly similar but distinct glyphs from each other. Assuming the text is meaningful, there is some commonality between what these three glyphs encode, but the number of [i]s is indeed meaningful, and the three are not exactly the same.
  
• That said, there are probably nevertheless places where a scribe meant to write [aiin] but wrote [ain] or [aiiin] instead, and vice versa. Therefore, the [a...n] series should probably be seen by statistical analysts as introducing a certain amount of error in the system — noise in the signal, if you will — that cannot be eliminated until/unless a good deal of meaning can be extracted from the text through other approaches.
  
• There is some commonality between what [a] encodes, and what the [ai(ii)n] series encode.
  
• [an] and [aiiiin] are probably always scribal errors
  
• How far to the left the flourish of the [n] reaches is an idiosyncratic property of the scribe's handwriting, and is not orthographically meaningful. That is, it tells us ea lot about which scribal hand wrote it, but little to nothing about what information the vord encodes.
  
• The origin of this series of glyphs is in Latin scribal abbreviations and shorthand. In this case, for a word ending made of Roman letters that were written entirely with minims (i, m, n, u, v, and w). This says nothing, necessarily, about what meanings (if any) this series of glyphs encode in the VMS.
  

Still unsettled, for me, is the relationship between [ai(i)r] and [ai(i)n]. Are these equivalent? They certainly behave similarly. But [ar] and [an] do not. Again the dilemma: do we treat this distinction as meaningful, treat it as meaningless and assume that scribal errors account for it, or throw the Rubik's cube at the wall in frustration and conclude all of the damn book is meaningless?