[Blog Post] MSI at last!

[hiki33]

Good point - why did he feel the need to write on the actual MS in the first place? I would think that at this time in history and for a man of his position, paper would have always been on hand. If you are right that he probably practiced on paper, then why write on the MS if it is just an attempt? I find it all very confusing.

One possibility we might consider is that the vertical column of Voynichese glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was written by a different person -- and at a different, earlier time -- than the two columns of Latin characters.  It may even originally have served a function similar to the other vertical glyph columns found on f49v, f66r, and f76r, whatever that was -- the main difference being that it's written to the right of the main text block rather than to the left.

Someone (Marci?) might have seen a column of glyphs on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. -- with a large red glyph or symbol at the top -- and observed that it contained roughly the right number of entries to be an alphabetic key.

The two columns of Latin characters could then represent two hypotheses:

(1 = Left) That the large red symbol was not part of the cipher alphabet, so that the first "small" glyph corresponded to a, the next to b, etc.
(2 = Right) That the large red symbol was part of the cipher alphabet, so that it corresponded to a, the first "small" glyph to b, and so on.

Among other things, this explanation could help account for the presence in the column of what look like very rare glyphs -- i.e., they weren't originally written there to be part of an alphabetic key, and were only interpreted that way at some other, later point.

I think that's a very plausible suggestion. Which brings us to the question what the purpose of those columns is in the first place