A Beginner’s Question: What is EVA-b?

[-JKP-]

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Then I checked You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and found EVA-u on f89v1 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). At the same spot, voynichese.com recognize this word (du) as ligature an (dan). Though a bit unexpected, at least I’ve found it.

If this were Latin, then (du) would not be a ligature of (dan). They would not be different ways to write the same thing, and a ligature would not be used in this way at the end of a word because it would be ambiguous.

In Latin du is "a" with a tail, which is the same as putting a line over the top of the "a" (a macron, which indicates an abbreviation). The tail is simply there for rapid writing, rather than lifting the pen and adding a line over the "a".

Similarly, dan would be read (in Latin) as dav with the "v" having a tail. Thus it would be an abbreviation once again. So you can see, it would confuse to use "av" ligature here and would be ignoring the meaning of the tail. In medieval Latin (and possibly in Voynichese), the tail was not an embellishment, it was an abbreviation symbol. At the ends of words, it often stood for "er" but it could also mean that "n" or "m" (or other letters) were missing at or near the end of the word. Abbreviations were intrinsic to medieval western languages. They had many different apostrophe symbols.


There's no guarantee that Voynichese tails have the same significance as Latin tails (perhaps only the shapes were copied), but it's important to know that in Latin, the tails are very meaningful and usually represent at least one missing letter.