Subsitution key on f1r

[ololololo]

Going by the article, this might have been an early attempt at translation conducted by Johannes Marcus Marci. Now I know that this key cannot provide any actual translation of the manuscript. All the same I was curious as to why specifically this key was chosen. After all, someone (Marci according to the handwriting analysis) must have had a hunch that this was the way to go. They made sure to write it down on the very first folio. If they were just toying around why not scribble on some piece of paper instead of the actual vellum? 

I'm not sure we have the same understanding of what happened on this margin. As far as I understand, specifically the Latin writing was identified as Marci's. Given that the Voynichese column has unique characters that don't appear elsewhere in the manuscript at all (at least not in the folios we have) while some existing characters don't appear in the list, I assume this column was there before Marci and is likely part of the original manuscript, and the upper right red weirdo is the heading of this column. What Marci did was only to write Latin letters next to the glyphs. Maybe, for the first attempt he made a mistake skipping a character and then produced another column.

What is more, I'm not at all sure this was an attempt of solving the cipher via substitution. This would be a very strange attempt, its failure would be obvious immediately just looking at the Voynichese on the same page. It could be just a way to give the glyphs an easy to understand names (similar to what EVA does nowadays), because properly writing some of the glyphs is not easy and giving them names would simplify the communication about this script. In this case writing this list in a permanent ink on the first page would make sense.

This can be confirmed by the fact that the column in the middle is erased more thoroughly than the Latin letters.
But the inconsistency is that the symbols don’t look much like Voynichese. Look at what should be EVA r or EVA y. Also, in this alphabet, something “quirky” happens with f1r.