The Voynich-Ms as a concatenation of abbreviations

[Helmut Winkler]

I am not sure if I understand what you mean, but if there is functional unit, it is the socalled word. Basic observtions cn be deceptive

Whether the observations are named LAAFU or something less fancy (like line patterns), the fact of their presence is not going to go away by ignoring them. Then there are paragraph-level observations that are even more puzzling.

Anyway, abbreviations make no sense in a text that has nearly 7000 dy and other very frequent patterns: they would be the first to be shortened if the author(s) cared about available space enough to write a "concatenation of abbreviations". Not extending the character set to have enough abbreviations symbols to cover the frequent patterns is surprising: if Avicenna had to be credited thousands of times, the authors would abbreviate the name to a single A-like symbol. I remember seeing such a symbol for Aristotle in a XVth century ms instead of the more usual ari+macron. And that's only the h0 entropy problem (not nearly enough symbols for abbreviations).

1) The problem I have with all these observations, beginnimg with Currier is that no one can give me an explanaion

2) d'9 is an abbr. (likely for dictum), there seems to be an a abbr. for somehing else, he abbreviated Avicenna as aui or au and a much better example for name abbr. are the sigla for the glössatores in legal mss.