Renez wrote:We simply don't know if e was meant to represent a consonant. Saying that Eva changes it, means that one might assume that it was. We don't even know if it is a complete plain text symbol or phoneme. It could just represent a minim in another script, or a diacritic. We don't know if ee is the same as two e 's and eee is the same as three e 's.
Of course we don't know if e was meant to represent a consonant. We don't even know if it is meant to represent a letter, but what we DO know is that the choice of the "e" shape for the Voynichese "c" shape affects people's PERCEPTIONS of Voynichese.
Every time I have criticized this choice, it has been in the context of computational attacks, an environment in which a high proportion of researchers ASSUME "e" is a vowel. I've also seen people say with strong conviction on the forum that they think it is a vowel. By transliterating "c" with a vowel, we create the ILLUSION that Voynichese is comprised of words with a natural consonant-vowel balance.
Yes, I know, I know... they shouldn't assume that. I don't assume that, but go back through all the computational attacks and what do you find? A huge proportion make exactly that assumption, just as a huge proportion assume VMS tokens are words.