Mapping between Currier A and B

[MarcoP]

Here are the links to Julian Bunn's 2013 posts about the subject of this thread (thanks to Emma for bringing them to my attention).

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I think this set of posts is one of the most extensive tackling of the problem: they are certainly worth reading for people interested in this line of research. Julian makes use of the "101" Voynich transliteration system, that he "tweaked" in order to fit it to his approach to language mapping.

If I understand correctly, his approach is similar to what I did in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: searching for a mapping that minimizes word-frequency differences (I later switched to minimizing bigram frequencies). Bu apparently Julian only/mostly considered mapping a single character to another single character (where single characters in his modified-101 system sometimes correspond to more than one EVA character). I considered mapping between slightly longer character sequences. Also, I included the word-break character among the possibilities, while Julian's mapping only maps each single source word into exactly one target word. I believe that allowing for variability in word-spacing is important, for instance to account for some of Currier's observations: -‘Unattached’ finals scattered throughout Language ‘B’ texts in considerable profusion; generally much less noticeable in Language ‘A.’-

For those who (like myself) are not familiar with 101, this is the conversion table from the March 5 post, rendered with the EVA system and EVA font:
   

In all the tests I ran, there were some common features in the results:
Mixing between “e” and “y” [i.e. l and r]– when writing Language A, the use of “e” appears to be equivalent to the use of  “y” in Language B, and vice versa
Mixing between  8,f,F,k,K,g,G,r,R,?  and so on – the Gallows glyphs swap amongst themselves, and “8” [EVA:d]

These results point out one of the many difficulties of the task: some glyphs (likel and r, or the whole gallows set) are highly interchangeable.