Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels

[Mark Knowles]

Fontana's cipher has a few systematic aspects that seem to be particular for him. For example: using very similar symbols for the vowels.
Apart from that, it seems to me not to be fundamentally different from other systems that use alternative symbols for simple substitution.
In particular the example in the well-known Heidelberg MS Pal.Germ.597 is very similar, and contemporaneous with Fontana's work.

So while these two are similar, the Voynich MS does two things that are very different.
One is that it has something like glyph harmony or a curve-line system, as currently discussed in this forum.
The other is that it has a tendency to cursive writing. This is facilitated by the first point.

These two points are not found in Fontana, the alchemical cipher or any cipher I am aware of.
I could ask if anyone has any examples, but especially the first point seems essentially impossible to achieve with a cipher alphabet.

I could do with reading more on the curve-line system argument, however I think I get what you are driving at. First of all broadly on the subject of a cursive script, it would be possible to produce a cipher alphabet which would lend itself to cursive writing, though I daresay it would require some work. In fact if one was writing a long text being able to write it quickly would be a real advantage, so that could be an impetus to designing such  script.

Now, onto the question of the curve-line system. As I have made clear my suspicion is that the Voynich contains a sizeable filler text and more specifically certain vords are meaningless or null as I prefer to say.(For those who like the term, I mean steganography. Steganography is a term that I personally don't like as it has a much wider not-specific meaning than I am trying to convey.) So for me there is always the question of the properties/structure of the meaningful text and the properties/structure of the filler text, which may be very different. Now it is regularly pointed to the structure of Voynichese, which can be something like prefix-stem-suffix. It is however the case that there are a number of vords which don't conform to this structure. Like I would imagine the same applies to this curve-line system. My suspicion has been that these elements of word structure are particularly a feature of the null word/filler text that I have referred to.

So to reiterate, when one say the Voynichese words have a specific structure does one mean ALL Voynichese words have that structure or a large number of them do? From what I have seen there are a preponderance of words of defy these proposed structures. So these structural features are probably not universal, though in fact it is true that they are highly prevalent. When I first started to learn about the Voynich my guess was that the repeated words that I heard about were what I term null words and recently after studying labels more I have come to the conclusion that these kinds of words are more common than I expected. This is the explanation which makes most sense to me and is consistent with the idea of the Voynich being a cipher and really explanatory of most or many objections to that idea, such as differences in statistical features. On the basis of having studied labels I find it hard to find a satisfactory explanation than that some of them are null vords. Likewise for a variety of reasons I find it unlikely that all vords are null.