Lingua Volgare Shorthand

[MarcoP]

While a shorthand naturally increases flexibility, it is by far not as arbitrary as you show here. We read the bench glyph with plume as Pi/Fi. 

Thank you, I had missed that. This sounds quite dysfunctional. pi/fi are not shortened, but replaced with a sequence which requires a similar number of strokes, only making the text more ambiguous (by dumping the p/f distinction). Not an abbreviation, but pure information loss.

Abbreviated medieval scripts tend to do the opposite: reducing the number of strokes while preserving most of the phonetic content.

EDIT: I am probably missing something again. How is f-without-i encoded? E.g. how are these words written?

felce, fusto, foglia, falce

EDIT2: no problem, I see that ch can stand for both p and f. More information loss....