Positional allography?

[oshfdk]

It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols? What if symbols change shape depending on where they are in the word?

I'd say the puzzling thing is not certain symbols or sequences appearing at the end of words, this commonly happens in many languages. E.g., "-ing" is mostly EOW in English, abbreviate "ing" as some symbol (say, ŋ) and it will mostly appear at the end of words.

The puzzling feature of Voynichese is that some symbols or combinations appear predominantly at the end of lines and some other symbols or sequences have higher occurrence near the beginning of lines or beginning of paragraphs. This is called line-as-a-functional-unit or LAAFU, as far as I know.