I often wonder if this is a separate character OR if it reveals what was in the scribe's mind when it was written and is perhaps a mistake (a blunder):
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The character on the right is not in the Basic EVA set, which means it is not in any of the transcripts created with Basic EVA.
It is, nevertheless, more frequent than people might expect (occurs more often than the VMS "rare" characters).
In Latin-character languages, this would be interpreted as the "cl" ligature (which is quite common). What it means in Voynichese, I don't know.
It is, of course, not possible to do statistical comparisons between the 8 shape and the cl shape by using transcripts that don't record the distinction.
This is the essence of the difficulty in transliterating an unknown script.
One cannot be certain whether some observed differences indicate that there is a different character, or whether this is a handwriting variation.
With known languages, one has the context to help.
Basic Eva inherited a lot from the existing transliterations, mainly Currier and FSG, in which these shapes were all considered the same character, which both transliterated as '8'. There is an extended Eva character, number 152 (transliterated as @152; ) which looks like the right-hand example, but it appears only 3 times in the ZL file.
On the other hand, the v101 alphabet recognises three different forms. The simple 8, the one that looks like the right-hand figure, and a third one that is open at the bottom. They are transliterated as '8', '7' and '6' , and appear 10,346 , 2715 and 114 times respectively.
The v101 has many such examples. The best known are the variations of Sh with different plumes, but also f and p are both split into two types, depending on whether the horizontal bar ends with a hook or not.
I might have recorded the difference in one of my transcripts, which means I could look at the stats to see if it behaves differently, but I simply don't have time right now.
My gut feeling, before looking at the numbers, is that it probably behaves the same as EVA-d, but only because a number of shape variations in the VMS are that way, not because I've studied it yet.
It happens with moderate frequency, the most obvious early instance being on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
It looks like EVA-d that's been pulled out of shape because one of the lines is straight instead of a curve.
The fact that it corresponds to a known ligature could be relevant. Your snippet then shows the word "clar" in perfectly normal Latin script.
On the other hand, my first impression is that there may be a continuum from the 8 shape to this one, which might make transliteration very difficult.
The clip in the opening post is from You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and there the "unusual" 8 is surrounded by "normal-looking" 8's, so one really has to wonder what this means.
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I often wonder, when I see instances of Voynich characters written like Latin characters (which happens fairly frequently) whether the scribes are writing in Voynichese but maybe visualizing Latin chars in their heads while writing because Voynichese is less familiar to them.
Another possibility is that the cl is a blunder and the scribe accidentally wrote normal text rather than cipher text. It's one of the reasons I wondered whether the d char might be a ligature.
And, of course, it's possible that it's a separate character from d, but less common than most (but not entirely rare).
The word "clar" is not very language-specific. It was used in numerous languages (both Romance and Germanic) and meant essentially the same thing.
I am hesitant to think it's actually "clar", the stats don't support it very well, but in any language that uses Latin characters, it's clearly written as such.
It's also possible that it's "clar[e/er]". A tail added to an r is frequently an abbreviation symbol for e or er.
And, in some languages, it's also possible for it to be clair because the i with a tail often uses the tail for e or er or even sometimes us.
Yet another possibility (of several I can think of) is that he started to write a ch and then recovered his mistake.
This character happens fairly frequently, although the one above is one of the clearest examples. But the straight back is not uncommon and does look distinctly different from the d.
Here are a couple from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and from f55r :
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When I see ones like this:
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I'm inclined to think it's supposed to be d rather than a separate character, based on how it is positioned, but even if it is, it might be a clue to the scribe's thought process. When people write with unfamiliar alphabets, they tend to remember characters based on what is familiar.
(PS, I absolutely HATE that new function that automatically inserts a period every time you type more than one space. I constantly have to go back and remove them.)