Glyph counts between Gallows

[julian]

This is not specifically about your work, Julian, but I think in general parsing is not considered enough. Too often, people take EVA as "Voynichese", while questions of parsing should really come between EVA and certain statistical analyses. Basically anything that focuses on characters: character entropy, glyph counts etc. EVA was never intended to "correctly" represent Voynichese, just to be able to type it into a computer. 

I also don't think it was Takahashi's intention to provide a "correct" parsing of the MS, just to somehow represent it in a computer-readable form using EVA. While I greatly appreciate and make use of his efforts, we must keep in mind that at the time he was a biology major who self-describes as, I quote, "an idiot who spent his college days deciphering Voynich".

I think your research is really interesting, so I hate the sound of my own complaining, but I am just afraid that this is an analysis of EVA, not necessarily of the VM. Between EVA and character-based analyses looms the matter of parsing, which is in my opinion the greatest challenge we face.

Hi Koen, 

I'm not sure what you are getting at when you say that the analysis is of EVA and not the VMS. 

EVA is one person's attempt to make a machine readable version of the text. There are several others, all with their pros and cons. That EVA is a good approximation of what we see on the folios is not in dispute (is it?). I mean, the way EVA represents a gallows as p,f,k or t seems reasonable to me, and the way it represents the benched gallows likewise. In Voyn_101 it is done differently - notably, if I remember correctly, there are 19 different gallows glyphs! 

But whatever transcription is used, if it's faithful to what appears in the manuscript, the counting of glyphs seems a valid activity, and the counts will reflect what is actually on the folios. The values of the counts will surely differ amongst the transcriptions.

I feel like I'm missing your point, apologies if so :-)