The Voynich manuscript decoding method proposal by Maria Rita Lunazzi

[davidjackson]

io write in english, but automatically its converted in Italian ?

Hi Maria
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I'm afraid I don't entirely understand your usage of the term "brachygraphy", when you say it is stenography + latin abbrv.

Brachygraphy is a particular dead end of short-hand, which had a brief popularity in the late 16th century and early 17th century, and was developed by a London schoolmaster called Peter Bales. Another popular system, used for a short while by the Royal Court, was Characterie - there is, for example, a reference to it in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor. There are others. Brachygraphy and Characterie were developed by some other authors, but the dictionary used was unwieldy and newer systems, usually based upon phonetics (stenography), supplanted it. Both systems were based upon the same list of 536 key words. (You combined the "key words" to copy out the whole word, they were common start and endings of words).

It is, in brief, a "proprietary" short-hand system developed by one man which had a brief popularity, and saw several other books develop upon it, but which was based upon a dictionary lookup system and was quickly supplanted by true stenography, based upon phonetics. See, ie, "‘Swifte and Secrete Writing’ in Seventeenth-Century England, and Samuel Shelton’s Brachygraphy" by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for more upon the subject.

Latin abbreviations, on the other hand, are a way to quickly compress common Latin words and phrases to speed up handwriting. They are indeed a type of short-hand, but are mixed in with standard text. They pre-date any reasonable attempt at short-hand, especially the ones that were popular around the 17th century onwards. Medieval L.A. are often codified and well known, and indeed many VM glyphs resemble some of them.