The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There have been anecdotal reports that Voynichese is not very convenient to write, at least not with a quill. [...] 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

A quill pen must be pressed lightly onto the paper/vellum, so that the two prongs are slightly spread apart, in order to get the ink to flow properly.  This is best done when pulling the pen in the general direction of the handle.  For a right-handed Scribe, that means preferably south-west, south, or west.  

Pushing the pen forward (in the direction opposite to the handle) or sideways risks snagging it onto irregularities of the paper/vellum, with undesired results.  To write strokes in those directions, the nib of the pen must be carefully shaped, and the pen must just touch the paper much more lightly than used in the "pull" strokes. As a result, strokes in those directions tend to be thinner and tapering, as the ink at the tip of the pen is quickly exhausted.  

Thus rotating a character by 90 degrees is not a good idea, as strokes in the "good" directions will become strokes in the "bad" directions.  The main strokes of the Voynichese glyphs, like e and the two sides of the o, are traced the SW, S, and N directions. The plumes of s, r, Sh, n, and part of the loops of d, m, t, k etc seem to be traced mostly in the "bad" direction. 

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".

Indeed pairs of Voynichese glyphs with "similar" shapes like a and o, t and k, r and s seem to have similar next- and prev-glyph distributions, as if they were phonetically similar (both vowels, both consonants, both tone markers, a voiced/unvoiced pair, etc).

By the way, that table that I posted may be incorrect, in that the glyph that is the combination of an e stroke with an e stroke is probably Ch, not ee.  Likewise the combination of i with e would be Ih, not ii. Indeed, in Ch the ligature and the second e can be drawn as a single stroke h; so Ch would be another 2-stroke (not 3-stroke)  glyph, and Sh a 3-stroke (not 4-stroke) one.