12-08-2020, 01:36 PM
To render the Voynich MS text into a computer-readable form is called 'transliteration'.
Historically, this has been called 'transcription' but the two processes are not the same.
Take the letter from Marci to Kircher (1665). We have access to a graphical image of this letter, which is written in a known language (Latin) and a known alphabet. It can be (and has been) transcribed.
Other hand written manuscripts are more difficult to read, use abbreviations and omit characters. They can still be transcribed, but there is a set of conventions for resolving the abbreviations and omissions.
With the Voynich MS it is very different. We cannot read it and it is not Latin. The best one can do is to try to identify the individual forms, and render them in electronic form as consistently as possible. This process, which is also applied to texts in known non-Latin alphabets, is called transliteration.
This has been done many times for the Voynich MS, and different people/groups have come up with different results.
The 'easy' interpretation is that these people defined tables from the Voynich glyphs to alphanumeric characters, but the more complete and correct interpretation is that the decision rules have been different in all cases.
In the 'easy' interpretation they can be easily translated between each other back and forth, but in the more accurate interpretation this is not possible without loss of information.
This can be exemplified with the case of the character d.
It looks like an eight, so FSG transliterated it as 8, so did Currier, in Eva it is 'd' and in v101 it is again 8.
However, v101 (and also Eva) recognise several different forms. The main forms are transliterated as 6, 7, or 8.
In Eva there is the high-Ascii code &152; but this is hardly used in the LZ or ZL files.
The problem is not whether one uses 8 or 'd', but where one draws the limit.
I highlighted this last sentence, because I get the impression that even experienced Voynich MS researchers do not fully grasp this idea.
It is immaterial whether one transliterates e as 'e' or 'c'.
It is immaterial whether one transliterates Sh as 'sh' or 'Sh'.
Coming back to the title of this post, it is very tempting to map 'expectations' of the meaning of some glyphs to the way they are transliterated.
Even if we think that e looks like a 'c', it does not mean that this is what it is supposed to represent. In fact, that is extremely unlikely, but that is subjective and can be ignored for now. What should be clear to Voynich researchers is that just mapping Voynich symbols to plain text characters in some language will not work.
Historically, this has been called 'transcription' but the two processes are not the same.
Take the letter from Marci to Kircher (1665). We have access to a graphical image of this letter, which is written in a known language (Latin) and a known alphabet. It can be (and has been) transcribed.
Other hand written manuscripts are more difficult to read, use abbreviations and omit characters. They can still be transcribed, but there is a set of conventions for resolving the abbreviations and omissions.
With the Voynich MS it is very different. We cannot read it and it is not Latin. The best one can do is to try to identify the individual forms, and render them in electronic form as consistently as possible. This process, which is also applied to texts in known non-Latin alphabets, is called transliteration.
This has been done many times for the Voynich MS, and different people/groups have come up with different results.
The 'easy' interpretation is that these people defined tables from the Voynich glyphs to alphanumeric characters, but the more complete and correct interpretation is that the decision rules have been different in all cases.
In the 'easy' interpretation they can be easily translated between each other back and forth, but in the more accurate interpretation this is not possible without loss of information.
This can be exemplified with the case of the character d.
It looks like an eight, so FSG transliterated it as 8, so did Currier, in Eva it is 'd' and in v101 it is again 8.
However, v101 (and also Eva) recognise several different forms. The main forms are transliterated as 6, 7, or 8.
In Eva there is the high-Ascii code &152; but this is hardly used in the LZ or ZL files.
The problem is not whether one uses 8 or 'd', but where one draws the limit.
I highlighted this last sentence, because I get the impression that even experienced Voynich MS researchers do not fully grasp this idea.
It is immaterial whether one transliterates e as 'e' or 'c'.
It is immaterial whether one transliterates Sh as 'sh' or 'Sh'.
Coming back to the title of this post, it is very tempting to map 'expectations' of the meaning of some glyphs to the way they are transliterated.
Even if we think that e looks like a 'c', it does not mean that this is what it is supposed to represent. In fact, that is extremely unlikely, but that is subjective and can be ignored for now. What should be clear to Voynich researchers is that just mapping Voynich symbols to plain text characters in some language will not work.
