The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

Indeed the Author clearly designed the script by combining a small set of simple strokes in (almost) all possible ways:

My guess is that the motivation was to optimize the speed of writing.  This seems to be a common feature of stenography (not "ga"!) schemes.

There have been anecdotal reports that Voynichese is not very convenient to write, at least not with a quill. I tend to agree, though my personal experience with quills is limited. The most obvious examples are the gallows. If these are just 4 characters, then using a simple v shape rotated in 4 cardinal directions would create a much simpler script, and in the extremely rare cases where proper v is used, it could be replaced with a more elaborate symbol.

I think someone in the past proposed that the shapes of the glyphs reflect the phonology in the way similar to Korean You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where "the letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them". Hangul is roughly contemporary with the Voynich Manuscript, so the idea certainly wouldn't be much ahead of its time.