Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[Witch Mountain]

Why not just suppose we are dealing with a mixture of characters and added modifiers?  That's not a rhetorical question - I don't see why it should be necessary to imagine an Indo-European language acting like a non-European language, when the simpler answer is.. what Stolfi said.

Straightforward answer: Because most people on this board do not speak Chinese

More lengthy answer: Chinese and Egyptian use modifiers because their scripts are not as phonetic as a plain alphabet. Chinese adds modifying characters that "help" you figure out the pronunciation of a word:

女 = nǚ (woman)
馬 = mā (horse)
媽 = mǎ (mother - the "馬" has been added to the woman character "女" to modify its pronunciation)

With an alphabetic script (as Voynich appears to be) however, these modifiers would be unnecessary. We would just write out the correct pronunciation.