Is the Voynich illegible?

[Mark Knowles]

I actually think that the quality of transcription is not very important for VMS research. Even the most ideal transcription won't affect key properties such as word/letter frequencies greatly.

Well, there could be a tendency throughout the manuscript by transcribers to misidentify an EVA-a as an EVA-o And therefore an improved transcription could make a difference to the frequencies of EVA-a In fact when it comes to vords only 1 character needs to be misidentified for the whole word to be misidentified.

A good theory cannot depend entirely on the exact transcription of 1, 3 or 23 words - they could be errors, proper names, foreign words. Either make assumptions about these words or take another piece of text (there is a lot of text out there) - in any case it is the next step that really matters.

A standard approach to deciphering a text is to construct a crib, this could be 1, 3 or 23 words. The fewer the errors the better the crib. I have found fewer than 10 words that I know that I consider could possibly be used as crib words. The history of Voynich research and the construction of possible cribs is not a good one, but any crib word could help. Although I am inclined, given my perspective on the nature of the cipher, to the view that quite a lot of crib words would be required in and of themselves to decipher the Voynich. However a crib could be coupled with other techniques.

I am of the opinion that the following, from the rosettes page, shows the directions North, South, East and West in abbreviated form. This would seem to contradict other discussed directions on this page, but I see these as local directions not whole page directions. (I think all the characters are clear except the 3rd character of the top word.)