observations made to date on the manuscript Humanistic Writing

[LisaFaginDavis]

In truth, because Voynichese doesn't use the Roman alphabet, it can't really be classified using Latin paleographical terminology. We can  talk about tendencies and overall stylistic similarities, but I think we have to be cautious about trying to pin it down using terms developed for a completely different set of symbols. I do think it's valuable to consider secondary terms like bookhand, cursive, and hybrid, however. Because of the lack of ligation, I wouldn't classify Voynichese as a cursive and, without having access to both a bookhand AND a cursive version of the script, we can't define a hybrid version. The exception to the lack of ligation is [qo] which, as I have argued, may be a single character since the symbols are (nearly) always ligated. The same might be argued for [ch], although since we just don't know the function of [ch] and its gallows-interpolated versions, it's hard to classify (something else I'm working on from a paleographical perspective).

The fact that [q] and [o] can be (but admittedly are rarely) separated by a gallows ([qpo] on 101r.1, [qfo] on 82v.33 (the best example), [qko] on 7r.1 and elsewhere) suggests that indeed [ch] should, by analogy, also be considered a single character whether benched or not.