The incredible unravelling of the Voynich Manuscript

[ReneZ]

Theory 2:

 

Almost all paragraphs of the Voynich manuscript begin with one of the four characters with ascenders. Some deciphered text passages indicate that this initial letter often does not belong to the first word at all.

 

This finding leads to the conclusion that the character with ascender at the beginning of a paragraph must have an independent, special meaning (and also because otherwise every paragraph would have to be "bent" linguistically to a beginning with these four initial characters). One possibility would be that these characters are used here as abbreviations for classification comments such as topic, thesis, paragraph or comment.

By chance I recently looked at the statistics of paragraph-initial characters, and there are a surprisingly large number that do not start with the tall characters (usually called gallows).

That these characters are likely to be taken separately, and are not really part of the first word, is certainly a reasonable hypothesis. It has been long suspected.