Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Characters similar to most of the Voynichese glyphs can be found in various manuscripts, often as abbreviations as JKP has shown before.

But those other manuscripts also use many glyphs that are not of that form, because they are letters of the Latin or other traditional alphabet. The Voynichese script is entirely made of those systematic 2-stroke glyphs, plus the 3-stroke Sh and very very few other exceptions like v or x .