The Voynich Ninja

(05-11-2025, 08:12 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-11-2025, 11:43 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The next point is a bit abstract so I will use an image.

You mean like this:



(That is from a tech report I was writing 20 years ago and never finished.)  I changed my views a bit since then.  For one thing, now I believe that ideally h is a single stroke too, and the ligature is not a separate stroke.  Thus ch and ih are two strokes, not three, and should replace the last column of that table.

All the best, --stolfi

I agree that ch and ih must be two pen strokes but the gallows characters, to me, seem less clear. It's certainly natural and on close inspection of the text seems clear that they're probably written in one (the bench less gallows that is). Although, they maybe came from a tradition of single stroke elements that, in practice, became one.

It's definitely interesting to consider the possible meaning of pen stroke elements rather than full characters.

Hope you don't mind it going a tad off-topic, but to touch on what you and Jorge said, my previous work also found "ch" to be two parts.
If trying to map how the building blocks of glyphs interact with each other and which seem to be much less common or non-existent such as "yy", to use the topic of this thread, then I thought "ch" could not be a single curved glyph or two curved glyphs as it looks, but the line in-between (or connected to final part - h) may be its building block and the curve the modification, rather than the other way around. It seemed to me more like "ek" than "ee" for example. 

Anyway, on topic. I think if you are looking at "y" as a suffix, there are interesting comparisons to be made between "iin" and "eeg", also "ain" and "edy", and some thoughts by others that maybe a transition from "ain" to "edy" is part of the "Language A" to "Language B" transition.

From what it looks like to me, i = e and n = y, and a = sh.