No text, but a visual code

[ReneZ]

The following symbols:  q  f  p  m  y   are demonstrably not to be identified with letters.

That's five out of (say) 25. How confident can one be that the others are?

And even if they are, what to make of a mixture of letters and non-letters?


This is what ReneZ wrote some time ago.

To keep this in the right context, what I meant is: they are not letters, but they could be (among other things):
- parts of letters (even diacritics)
- variant forms of letters

I certainly do not think that they are astrological (or other) symbols. In medieval texts, astrological symbols can appear inside running texts, but in those cases they are rare and easily recognisable.

JKP wrote:

y is a very common symbol (abbreviation) in medieval texts. It is so common it is sometimes included as the last "letter" of the alphabet.

m is also very common. It is an abbreviation for -ris and its homonyms. It is also sometimes used as a paragraph-end marker.

Both are demonstrably identified with letters.

Yes, they are in Latin manuscripts. Here we are talking about the Voynich MS, and the Voynich symbol y is certainly not to be equated with the Latin abbreviation -us (when in word-final position).