How Many Common, Unique Letters Do *You* Think There Are?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I think this is likely to be true, but I want to point out that's pretty surprising! Usually digraphs arise when trying to fit an existing alphabet to a new language. They are an odd choice when you are trying to solve the problem of representing a language from first principals and can just create a new letter to spec. Maybe this tells us something about the internal history of Voynichese, maybe the scribe was simply imitating the scripts he was familiar with. But that we both find ourselves drawn to this explanation should come as a surprise.

Indeed, alphabets created from scratch usually have one glyph for each sound of the language.  

But there are exceptions.  In the syllabic alphabets for Japanese (hiragana and katakana), a diacritic ゛is used  to turn the unvoiced consonant of some syllables like ta, ka, sa into the corresponding voiced consonant, namely da, ga, za.  In other languages like Guaraní and Portuguese a vowel can be pronounced "plain" or "nasalized" (sort of like with an "n" pronounced at the same time), which in the official scripts is indicated by a tilde ~ diacritic.  

So perhaps the e suffix of Voynichese serves a similar function.

And if the Author's native script used digrams for certain soulds, he may have carried over the practice without thinking.  Like, if he was German, he may have chosen to write the German hard "ch" sound as a digraph, with the Voynichese glyph for the "k" sound and the glyph for the "h" sound.

Eventually we will find out...

All the best, --stolfi