Is [a] always [a]?

[LisaFaginDavis]

I think it's really important in all of this to keep making the distinctions between an alphabet, a scribal inventory, a linguistic inventory, and even a phonemic inventory. Many of these differences in transcribing [iin] (for example) can be attributed to different goals of the transcriber. If you want to know how large the Voynichese alphabet is, then you have to make a decision about whether [iin] is a letter or a combination, but if you're going to use that transcription for, say, frequency analysis, you have to take into account that your count of [i] might be way too high. The number of glyphs in a scribe's graphic inventory (which is where my own work is headed) is almost always going to be larger than the number of "letters" in the "alphabet." For example, a medieval scribe might use three very different types of [r] depending on the context (word-end, word-initial, and in ligature with [i], for example), and someone looking at the script who didn't know that might think these represented three different "letters" and therefore end up with a larger number of letters in the proposed alphabet than there should be. A linguistic inventory might be closer to an alphabet, although it might also include bigraphs like our [qu]. A phonemic inventory, on the other hand, might be smaller OR larger than the alphabet, depending on the language. Not sure if this if helpful to others, but those distinctions have been helpful to me as I think about what the actual questions are that I'm trying to answer.