The Voynich Ninja

Full Version: Transliteration and interpretation of the Voynich MS text
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Transliteration is changing one alphabet for another.
Transcription is writing or printing something, in the same alphabet.
The philosophical idea posited by ReneZ is nothing new - he has been involved in this since almost the beginning.
However, I am 100% behind his idea. Transliterating into our alphabet is going to cause problems. It would be far better to transliterate into You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., something that didn't exist when EVA was being developed.
Many VMS-related conventions were developed during typewriter days.


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(12-08-2020, 05:05 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(12-08-2020, 03:17 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(12-08-2020, 02:51 PM)farmerjohn Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Using EVA-s both as standalone and as part of sh ligature is not extremely convenient, but normal parser can live with that: s before h - ligature, otherwise - standalone.

Yes, but there are a few instances of standalone EVA-S. Information is lost when converting to lowercase EVA, in these rare cases.
76r: qoteS
106v: toloS

Indeed, they are not common, but for the record, here is another one:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 04:05: Sody Sody

Yes, but here are gets into the area of rare characters, and one has to use the full extended Eva (or v101 for that matter). Notations in this case are different.
The following table may give an overview of all Sh-like characters that have been observed in the ZL and v101 transliterations.

[attachment=4671]
If Sh SH is a ligature (two glyphs combined), as it would be in Latin, then you don't need rare characters. So and Sy are easily represented with Basic EVA. If parsing is a concern, then a flag can be used, which is far more expedient than a list of rare characters.

We don't know if it's a ligature, that's still unknown, but if it is, then a chart full of rare characters is not needed to represent it when it combines with other characters.


In medieval scripts, using ligatures and abbreviations was normal and prevalent.

If it were Latin, it would actually be represented with three characters: the left side of the ligature, the right side of the ligature, and the macron.


Sh might not be a ligature, but on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the two parts are disconnected in several places (I have posted examples on my blog), and there are a number of places throughout the manuscript where both c and S are combined with glyphs other than h. There are also places where the macron is association with other characters, like ii and qo. It is not just Sh that has a macron-like shape hovering over it.
The variations posted as part of V101 is a more complicated issue.

We don't know if the bewildering variations in the macron-like VMS glyph are meaningful differences. Macrons varied quite widely in medieval scripts but they all meant the same thing, so variations in shape didn't matter.

But the VMS is different, and the macron-like shapes vary even more than was normal for medieval scripts.

Are the differences meaningful? I don't know. But if they are, then there might be numerous meanings for Sh.
JKP, the rules for Eva state that {aa} and Aa are two equally valid notations for the same thing.

So, according to the rules for Eva, one can write {sh} and Sh,  or {so} and So, but by convention the latter is written as {c'o} precisely because the "quote" can also appear with other characters.

The capitalised way is a bit less easy to recognise, but allows accurate rendition in the TT font.

For example: cTHhy looks like cTHhy , but when writing {cthh}y it is easier to see which characters are connected.

Due to the high frequency, Sh is usually simply written as sh.

When talking about ligatures and abbreviations, then one is of course talking about interpretation rather than transliteration.
(13-08-2020, 05:45 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...
When talking about ligatures and abbreviations, then one is of course talking about interpretation rather than transliteration.


Yes. But you have to interpret before you know what to transliterate. Or, alternately, have a variety of transliterations for the different interpretations.
(13-08-2020, 03:58 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Many VMS-related conventions were developed during typewriter days.


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Rene. Although the following examples contradict your decomposition method (bench wich apostrophe) , they should appear in your published table.
[attachment=4674]
Hello Vladimir,

my table is based on published transliterations, and the symbols that have been recognised by the people creating these.
It is adopting an approach that can be extended, namely grouping characters into 'families' based on generic or high-level appearance.
This makes the identification of any character a two-step approach:
- which family does it belong to?
- which family member is it.

From the existing transliterations, the answer to the first question is (of course) much more consistent, but it is also not possible to define clearly bounded families. There are always marginal cases.

There are still a great number of symbols in the MS that require a better representation in the transliteration files.
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