Positional allography?

[MarcoP]

This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"

However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape

The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?

What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?

Actually, positional allographs also occurred in medieval non-cursive European manuscripts (for purely aesthetic reasons, I guess). The two most obvious examples are short/long ‘s’ and rounded/straight ‘r’. The shape of ‘s’ was selected on the basis of word position (short for word-final), while ‘r’ was selected on the basis of the following character (round ‘r’ before a round character). We can be sure that Voynichese scribes were familiar with this practice.

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ordinatis
passibus gradiatur


In addition to proper allographs, there also are abbreviations which add even more ways to write some characters (see how -us is rendered in passibus).