07-03-2016, 02:00 AM
The purpose of every transcription alphabet that has ever been defined for the Voynich MS is to convert the handwritten text into anything that can be parsed and analysed by computer software. It is not meant in any way towards a 'translation'.
The 'best' alphabet available at the time when it was defined was Frogguy, but its very frequent use of the quote character made it quite suboptimal for computer parsing. To improve this, the Eva character set was selected as a set of 26 contiguous ascii codes.
One of the big problems with the Voynich script is that one cannot be sure which combinations of strokes are intended to form a single character. The gallows embedded in Eva-ch is a specific case. Furthermore, people tended to treat consecutive strokes of 'i' as a single characters, but consecutive strokes of 'c' as multiple. This may well be correct but we don't know. To avoid all this, Eva (like Frogguy) does not make any assumptions and the 'building of characters' is left as a next step to anyone interpreting the text.
An accurate transcription requires an alphabet of much larger size. Extended Eva and GC's v101 both go into this direction, but primarily to represent the rare characters. To 'do it right' one would need some combined superset of Eva and v101, such that one could translate all existing transcriptions into this new alphabet without loss, and eventually make a new 'super-transcription'. This would leave an additional very big problem to the interpreter: deciding which slightly different shapes represent the same or different characters.
One advantage of Eva is that it is very easy to learn and allows easy communication in fora like this. The big risk is that people may take it as an interpretation of the text which, as Anton correctly says, should not be done. It was never its purpose.
The 'best' alphabet available at the time when it was defined was Frogguy, but its very frequent use of the quote character made it quite suboptimal for computer parsing. To improve this, the Eva character set was selected as a set of 26 contiguous ascii codes.
One of the big problems with the Voynich script is that one cannot be sure which combinations of strokes are intended to form a single character. The gallows embedded in Eva-ch is a specific case. Furthermore, people tended to treat consecutive strokes of 'i' as a single characters, but consecutive strokes of 'c' as multiple. This may well be correct but we don't know. To avoid all this, Eva (like Frogguy) does not make any assumptions and the 'building of characters' is left as a next step to anyone interpreting the text.
An accurate transcription requires an alphabet of much larger size. Extended Eva and GC's v101 both go into this direction, but primarily to represent the rare characters. To 'do it right' one would need some combined superset of Eva and v101, such that one could translate all existing transcriptions into this new alphabet without loss, and eventually make a new 'super-transcription'. This would leave an additional very big problem to the interpreter: deciding which slightly different shapes represent the same or different characters.
One advantage of Eva is that it is very easy to learn and allows easy communication in fora like this. The big risk is that people may take it as an interpretation of the text which, as Anton correctly says, should not be done. It was never its purpose.