Atoms and elements of the Voynichese alphabet

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I believe that every ending ir is a rather common error by the Scribe, caused by him mis-reading an in in the Author's sloppy handwriting as r.  (But not every r is such a "quillo"!)

Claiming that one of the most common combinations is just a steady error while trying to write an even more common combination?  That would be an assumption I can't follow.

I have statistical and other reasons to suspect that ir is a variation of iin.  Starting from the fact that frequencies of the endings ir, iir, and iiir are roughly proportional to those of iin, iiin, and iiiin (the last in each set being zero).  

As I pointed out elsewhere, the n glyph is very often drawn by the Scribe himself with a round bottom rather than a sharp corner.  If a round n is raised a little and touches the preceding, i one gets a well-drawn r.  Thus my guess is that this accident often happened in the Author's draft, due to his poor handwriting; and that led the Scribe to often write ir instead of iin. Since iin is very common, that made the erroneous ir very common too.

On the other hand I believe that p and f are not distinct letters, but only ornate versions of other letters or digraphs -- sort of like our capital letters, but used in rather different ways.

The 4x17 sequence where only p and f are disturbing the perfect order, is tempting to dump the difference between both gallows. I wouldn't do that, both versions occur many times in texts, even together within same lines. Such effort to write 1 character in different ways...?

The Scribe obviously felt it necessary to embellish the first word or two of each parag.  I have seen manuscripts where the entire first line of each parag is written in a different font.  In the VMS, the puffs (p and f) are overly common in the first line of each parag.  And someone posted here another manuscript where the Scribe would now and then replace an ordinary letter, even in the middle of a word, with a tall letter that looked a lot like p or f, only more elaborate; and apparently the version of this tall letter was chosen randomly, irrespective of the letter that it replaced.  Putting all that together, I think that the hypothesis "puffs are ornate versions of other Voynichese letters" is quite plausible -- and I am not bothered by our failure to identify which letters they stand for.

And m is a Scribal abbreviation for iin (and maybe for in too).

Not the slightest hint anywhere for that understanding, isn't it?

In my transcription file, The pair am occurs ~810 times at the end of a word, and only ~20 times elsewhere.  That ratio is similar to that of aiin, that occurs ~3890 times at the end of a word but only ~40 times elsewhere. I take that as a hint not proof, of course) that m may be equivalent to iin.  

However, m occurs 760 times at the end of a line (counting figure intrusions as ends of lines), and only ~340 times at any other place. Whereas iin occurs ~530 times at the end of a line, but ~3550 in all other places.  I take these numbers as hint that, if m is indeed equivalent to iin, it was used by the Scribe instead of iin mostly when space was tight (or he was feeling lazy).

But scribe(s) made too much effort to distinct between m and g

We don't know whether the Scribe was choosing one or the other deliberately, or was just alternating at random.  

The letters p and f may or may not have a hook at the end of the horizontal arm  Those hooks required a bit of extra effort to write; does that mean that they are significant?  Most Voynichologists seem to have accepted the view of the early transcribers, that the hooks are just meaningless ornamentation.   Why not have the same view of the difference between g and m?

Anyway, g is so rare that mapping all g to m will not make decipherment much harder. We routinely accept that u = v in Latin manuscripts, even though they may be distinct in some cases.  On the other hand, if they are indeed the same, counting them separately will only introduce meaningless and distracting noise in the data. 

But I admit that g may be distinct from m.  In my file, g occurs ~110 times at the end of a word and only ~10 times elsewhere; but ~90 times at the end of a line and ~30 elsewhere.  So, even if it is distinct from m, it looks like another abbreviation that the Scribe used when he was short of space (or energy).  Maybe an abbreviation of aiin, oiin, or daiin?

All the best, --stolfi