The Voynich Ninja

Below is an image of 16 numbered glyphs, all taken from the main text of the VM. All I did was isolate the glyphs from two folios which were by the same scribe, same section (I would have used one folio, but two gave me just a bit more to work with). My question is simple: how would you transliterate these glyphs? Do you draw a line somewhere? One, two, three... different ones? How do you decide between one glyph and the other? Not that I put them in a rough order evolving from one extreme to the other, but that doesn't mean they are necessarily neatly grouped per type.

[attachment=7726]

Rules:
* No need to use EVA, you can invent your own system if you wish.
* Most importantly, the aim is not to capture every possible different stroke, but rather to represent each glyph you think is intended to be the same one by the same letter. For example, if you think glyphs 1, 2 and 3 are meant as the same letter and the rest is meant as a different letter, you can write: "A, A, A, B, B, B, B..."
* DO NOT look at any websites or existing transliterations. Just use your own intuition. It doesn't matter whether you're familiar with any existing systems or not.
* There is most definitely no right answer. I don't know the answer, and I'm pretty sure nobody does. I just want to find out how different people would tackle this problem.
* PM me your answer. Even if you use spoiler tags here, people will peek. Please participate, because the more answers I get, the more informative this will be.

I will just leave this clip from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. here to cause some confusion, no need to transcribe that.

[attachment=7727]

Since it doesn't quite fit the topic anyway, here only with spoiler tag.

The whole thing is a very interesting question for me, and it is nice to see that you are dealing with symbols and text.
What I also see is a possible single glyph, a two combination, three combination and a combination of an ending syllable as a possibility.

I got 4 entries so far, keep 'em coming!

I could try to figure out how I transliterated them originally some 20+ years ago, but here is with full hindsight, and using the STA-1 alphabet:

Sorry, link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

In my view there are three glyphs here.


I've PM'd you the sequence I'm seeing here.

Кoen, you gave only 4 spelling options for "d".
There are 6 variants of writing "d", where eva-i and eva-c are used as the first stroke. Next, one of the “modifiers” is added.
The first modifier makes a loop, turning left and ending at the base of the line. (ordinary "d" and examples 82-87)
The second modifier makes a loop and turns to the right at the base of the line (examples 53-60 on the base “c”, 46-52 on the base “i”).
The third modifier makes a loop and drops into the interlinear (examples 66-90, based on different first strokes).

READ POST #44 IN THE TOPIC  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

A - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8.
В- 7, 9, 11.
С- 12, 13.
D- 14, 15, 16.

Thanks for the responses everyone! I thought for a while how to visualize this and came up with the colored squares below. A different color basically means "person thinks something else starts here". The greyed out squares are uncertain, unclear or missing responses. I probably made a few mistakes, but this should give an overall impression of the situation.

[attachment=7729]

I got 11 responses. Out of those, I could not color a single identical row. However, if we ignore pfeaster's one uncertain square, he and nablator answered the same. I believe these were also the people wo most explicitly communicated their choices using EVA, which I suspect may be relevant somehow. Zobowiazanie's choices were similar to theirs.

Overall we see three blocks. Everyone agrees 1-6 are the same glyphs, and there is similar agreement about 14-15-16. As expected, everything in between is a bit of a mess.

Now, this exercise was not meant to determine how these glyphs should be read. As Marco also told me, some familiarity with the manuscript's writing system is required to judge some of these. And it can certainly help to see them in context.

Some people also told me that I'm pulling my punches and I could have found way more confusing examples. This is certainly true, but I didn't want to look through the manuscript to compose the most confusing sequence. I simply selected two folios from Q20 (f103r and f112r) and quickly composed a gradient of 8-shaped glyphs from them.

What prompted me to do this ties in to bi3mw's observation about the way these glyphs are drawn. Sometimes it looks like the scribe draws an "8" like I would, but sometimes it looks like they draw a "c"-shape first, the attach a counter-clockwise loop with a tail to it. This is the shape that could (and sometimes clearly wants to) continue into EVA-g. I find these two ways of writing "8" bizarre (though Wladimir says there are apparently even more). If the scribe regularly writes what we see as EVA-d in a manner that can be extended into EVA-g, and indeed a continuum appears to exist between the two (see 7-13 stats above), then might they be the same glyph? And if they are, then that means that the scribes used positional variation, which might have an impact on much more important glyphs than EVA-g.

Here is the image from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia again. If you were to transcribe this, both of them would be [n].

(09-10-2023, 04:38 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I got 11 responses. Out of those, I could not color a single identical row. However, if we ignore pfeaster's one uncertain square, he and nablator answered the same. I believe these were also the people wo most explicitly communicated their choices using EVA, which I suspect may be relevant somehow. Zobowiazanie's choices were similar to theirs.

We agree. 10 could have a faint tail or not, I don't know. I guessed not because there are other faint lines on the left that don't look like they belong to this word.

I don't understand why there should be several ways to write these glyphs, to me it looks like it's always two strokes: the e or i first, then the loop that ends with a tail (or not).
Depending on where the loop ends you get:
e s d g
i r j m

I don't think that some scribes (this one especially) had a good enough control of their quill: small variations were unavoidable and were not intentional. Only big variations (line or curve, tail or no tail) can be meaningful in my opinion.

(09-10-2023, 06:02 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't understand why there should be several ways to write these glyphs, to me it looks like it's always two strokes: the e or i first, then the loop that ends with a tail (or not).

If you intend on writing an 8-shape, wouldn't you start going clockwise in the top loop instead of drawing a "c" first and then lifting the pen? (I still know very little about this). If you are right that they generally drew the c-shape first, this would be interesting, because like you say several glyphs would be natural "stops" along the same trajectory. And even though they could probably have formed the "8" in a different way, they still followed this trajectory to write it.