Hey y'all! I've searched all over the Internet. Yes, even in the third page of Google results. But, I didn't really find anything. I need
some sort of thingy to work with when I start translating. The alphabets I've used in the past turned out to be just little fun fake thingies put together by random people.
This is probably a stupid question, but I'm just looking for an alphabet to use? Did anyone make that?
Thanks!
There are several - You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
EVA is the one people mostly use on here
There is no "alphabet". EVA is a transcription system used to put Voynichese glyphs on a Qwerty keyboard. While some of the symbols are similar in shape, no phonetic correspondence is expressed or implied.
(11-01-2026, 08:19 PM)Glamourous-complaint 98 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
The alphabets I've used in the past turned out to be just little fun fake thingies put together by random people.
This is probably a stupid question, but I'm just looking for an alphabet to use? Did anyone make that?
Thanks!
If you find the valid „real alphabet“ belonging to VMS characters, please let me now. As all other random people, I still try to validate my idea and few set of characters of this alphabet.
Alternatively, you can find the content and/or source language of VMS, the rest will be easy-peasy then.
Hi, if you would like to search for words in the "original" manuscript, you can use You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. Highlighting a word will display all matching words. Hovering your mouse over a highlighted word will show its transliteration in EVA. The complete text in EVA can be found at You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
EVA was developed to facilitate international exchange about the manuscript. It is a transcription system
I don't think they meant "a literal alphabet" guys, otherwise none of us would be here
Maybe I am mistaken though, stranger things have happened on this forum..
What is "alphabet"?
If you mean a set of used symbols then well... we have it.
If you mean a set of used symbols + rules how to speak them loud then we in fact don't have them.
And I believe OP meant symbols + rules.
By the way not every notation of language is alphabet. Chinese signs, Egyptian hieroglyphs or syllabaries are not alphabet.
And sets of signs used in ciphers may be called "alphabet" only coloquially.
Alphabet is simply speaking a type of writing where one symbol represents one sound.
So we don't even know if Voynich Manuscript uses alphabet, in precise meaning of that word.
(13-01-2026, 01:16 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Alphabet is simply speaking a type of writing where one symbol represents one sound.
Few languages are written in a 100% phonetic alphabet. Some are close (Serbian, Croatian), some are far (English).
Quote:Few languages are written in a 100% phonetic alphabet. Some are close (Serbian, Croatian), some are far (English).
I agree.
What I presented was a simple version. Wikipedia says in a few first sentences:
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
An alphabet is a writing system that uses a standard set of symbols, called letters, to more or less represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
There are actually border cases like
abugida: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
If "perfect" alphabet is one symbol = one phoneme and syllabary is not alphabet then abugida is something in-between.
So it may be actually more like a dimension and not a binary concept.
Turkish spelling is quite phonetic. It was created from scratch in the early 1900s, to replace the Arabic script which was poorly suited to the language. Thus it had no tradition that people would respect, for inertia or for conservatism. It has however one letter ('g' with caron) that is silent; IIUC it serves to prevent adjacent vowels from being pronounced as a diphtong (glide).
May scripts are "quasi-alphabetic" in that each letter usually represents one sound, but there are exceptions -- groups of two or more letters that represent one sound (like "ch" in Italian "chiaro"), one letter that represents two or more sounds (like "x" in English "axis"), and ambiguities in reading or writing.
I think it is more useful to consider how a writing system scores in two respects. For a person with basic command of the language,
(a) reading determinism: how reliably can they correctly pronounce an unfamiliar written word.
(b) writing determinism: how reliably can they write down the correct spelling of an unfamiliar spoken word.
Italian gets maybe 90% score on (a); not 100% because stress is phonemic but is not marked, and has two "e" sounds and two "o" sounds that are not distinguished in writing. ("botte" can have either "o", meaning either "hits" or "barrel"; and "pesca" may be either "peach" or "fishing" depending on the "e"). Offhand I think that it has 99.9% on (b), but I may be wrong.
From what I know of French, I would say that it gets 98% (a), but maybe 50% or less on (b). For one thing, the final "s" of written words is often omitted in the spoken language.
Spanish spelling has high score on both counts, mostly because of a relatively recent spelling reform.
Portuguese, in contrast, must have the second worst spelling system of all European languages -- second only to English, and arguably worse than the French one. It is bad on both (a) and (b).
German has the problem of two sounds for "ch", which is bad for (a) but not (b).
I heard that Czech spelling gets good grades on both items, whereas Russian scores a lot lower.
All the best, --stolfi