Fun with Ligatures and Brevigraphs

[JoJo_Jost]

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.

In my opinion, these tend to inflate the information content massively. And nothing is replaced, but added. There's no question that a "d" can be a "d", but it can also be a di, a "b" etc. One letter suddenly becomes many letters, which tend to expand the alphabet.

Combined with other letters, they form syllables and whole words.

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.

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(I accidentally pressed send.)

You know this place, why would the writer write this Gallow four times in a row, twice without a bow and twice with a bow? In my opinion, it doesn't make sense if they aren't different glyphs.