25-09-2016, 02:52 AM
So, slightly off-beat theory here, but hear me out.
1) The character q almost always occurs at the beginning of a word.
2) It seems to have a grammatical rather than sound function.
3) If it has a sound, then that sound occurs nowhere else in Voynich words.
We can unite these points by proposing that q derives from Arabic waw. In Arabic, the conjunction 'and' is written with the letter waw joined to the beginning of a word. The conjunction 'and' was borrowed into several languages, notably Persian and Turkish, but also others due to the influence of Arabic. But the sound itself, often taken as /v/ rather than /w/, may have either been missing from the host language or not expressed in the same way (even today the sound /v/ is often found in loanwords in Turkish).
Thus we could be dealing with a language and script which borrowed this way of writing 'and' from Arabic. The best part is that the characters even look similar:
Voynich:
q
Arabic waw:
![[Image: 65262]](http://www.charbase.com/images/glyph/65262)
Bonus! Straight waw used for Tatar:
![[Image: 08B1.png]](http://rishida.net/rishida/c/Arabic%20Extended-A/large/08B1.png)
1) The character q almost always occurs at the beginning of a word.
2) It seems to have a grammatical rather than sound function.
3) If it has a sound, then that sound occurs nowhere else in Voynich words.
We can unite these points by proposing that q derives from Arabic waw. In Arabic, the conjunction 'and' is written with the letter waw joined to the beginning of a word. The conjunction 'and' was borrowed into several languages, notably Persian and Turkish, but also others due to the influence of Arabic. But the sound itself, often taken as /v/ rather than /w/, may have either been missing from the host language or not expressed in the same way (even today the sound /v/ is often found in loanwords in Turkish).
Thus we could be dealing with a language and script which borrowed this way of writing 'and' from Arabic. The best part is that the characters even look similar:
Voynich:
q
Arabic waw:
Bonus! Straight waw used for Tatar:
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)