Fun with Ligatures and Brevigraphs

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Brevigraphs: Special shorthand characters that abbreviate common words or endings in medieval Latin, such as a ‘9’-shaped character for ‘-us’ or a stroke above the line for missing letters.

The similarities between some Voynichese glyphs and Medieval Latin brevigraphs are intriguing, even maddening, and may still be worth exploring.

However, one problem is that the total number of  (definitely) distinct Voynichese glyphs is barely enough for an alphabet.  If any of them are interpreted as brevigraphs (and there are dozens of these for Latin), the glyphs that remain would make an awfully small alphabet.

It could be that EVA and other transcription alphabets are conflating glyphs that are actually distinct Voynichese letters.  But I have yet to see any convincing alternative proposals.  

I spent a lot of time recently re-encoding all p/f gallows in the VMS transcription so as to distinguish the "hooked arm" and "straight arm" variants.  I haven't analyzed the results yet.  But I am afraid that (as others surely found already) that the distinction is not significant.  It seems that the Scribe added a hook whenever he felt like it and there was space for it.

You propose that the first Sh with extra-long ligature is different from ordinary Sh.  But how many of those long-Sh are there? Can they be distinguished from short-Sh, or are all Sh in a continuum between those two extremes?

By the way, I am not impressed by the similarity between iin and the "mum" brevigraph.  It seems that the LR horizontal line at the end of the plume is an essential feature of the latter, and usually there is not a hint of the same in the former.

All the best, --stolfi