The Voynich-Ms as a concatenation of abbreviations

[davidjackson]

The theory is very interesting and very similar to my own personal thoughts about the text, although I am the first to admit I don't have enough knowledge to be able to work out a proper transcription and expansion of the abbreviations.

I think it is entirely possible that the text is written in a personal shorthand that mixes known abbreviations with a private system. Most probably entire syllables are concatenated down.

A similar system is the Rossinols "Grand Cipher" in use in French administration during the 18th century, although I suspect this is not nearly as sophisticated as the G.C.

 There are of course several important indicators here which we need to work through. Let us setup a thought experiment where an educated person created their own syllabary shorthand. If glyphs can stand for both common words/phrases and syllables, then we start to explain away a lot of the repetition we see in the text.

ReneZ pointed out an important check (namely the t and d phoneme post) which is similar to something I've been working on over the last couple of years. There doesn't need to be any real consistency in the text, in a syllabary shorthand we need to be looking at a consistent pronunciation. 

The real problem? Without knowing the dialect then it's nigh on impossible to decipher. However, if several different scribes worked on the project, then there has to be internal coherence that we are missing.