The Takeshi Takahashi transcription

[-JKP-]

I don't want to go off-topic on the other thread, so I thought I would continue the Takahashi transcription commentary here.

Here is one of the problems with the Takahashi transcript. Once he gets used to certain patterns, he assumes they are part of the way Voynichese does things and imposes those assumptions on the text.

The following text clearly has spaces between EVA-d and "aiin"

   

and yet the transcription combines them as follows:

Takahashi transcription You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 12:  dchaiin daiin daiin

This makes "dain" look more frequent than it actually is.

• It is not unusual for EVA-d to stand alone (with spaces on either side).
  
• It is not unusual for "ain" to stand alone.
  
• It is not unusual for other glyphs (besides d) to occur directly before "aiin".
  

So it should not be assumed that d is always supposed to be attached to aiin/ain/an when there are clearly spaces on both sides. These are not half-spaces (which are numerous in the VMS). These are full spaces. (There is a half-space in the first token dchaiin and I honestly don't know how to interpret it (one vord or two?) other than to record it as a half-space.)

A more true-to-the-original transcription would be dchaiin d aiin d aiin or possibly d chaiin  d  aiin d aiin