Both when making a complete transliteration just before the year 2000, and while setting up the Eva and STA transliteration alphabets, I had to deal with these questions a lot.
Now it is important that decisions depend on the context. When making a transliteration (and the alphabet to use for it) one can make two types of mistakes:
1. to ignore certain variations in characters that are relevant (but of course we don't know)
2. to maintain variations in characters that are irrelevant (but again we don't know)
The first mistake is a much more serious one, because once the mistake has been made, one cannot undo it just by analysing the transliteration. One has to redo it.
When one has too many different characters, one may still decide later to consider several of them to be effectively the same.
Therefore, the safe way is to try to maintain the more 'obvious' differences.
It is clear that this is very subjective.
Some examples:
when making the v101 transliteration, GC decided that the various different forms of the curl on top of Sh is significant, so he distinguished them all.
Your third question is another example. Are bench characters beginning or ending with "i" significantly different from the ones with "c"?
We don't know.
One guideline might be to see to what extent the scribe seems to have made an effort to distinguish them.
This has not really been done consistently, and what we see may be misleading.
Effectively, the distinction between i and c shapes isn't always that clear. This is also true for r vs. s .
Other examples of relatively careless writing are a overlapping with o and even n overlapping with r .
Since we don't know the answer, one approach could be to state an assumption, and see where it leads.
This can create a lot of work, of course.
On your point 2, the o can appear at the start but also at the end, and so can a or y.
I have one hypothesis, unproven and very hard to prove except perhaps only by solving the entire text.
I included that in my music presentation of the last Voynich MS day,
This is that the gallows are ligatured variations of o+X+e.
Example: CKh is a ligatured variant of oke .
This is quite elegant as it 'explains' ALL possible pedestalled gallows.
OKe would also be oke but CKo would be oko
CK would be ok
etc...
Now it is important that decisions depend on the context. When making a transliteration (and the alphabet to use for it) one can make two types of mistakes:
1. to ignore certain variations in characters that are relevant (but of course we don't know)
2. to maintain variations in characters that are irrelevant (but again we don't know)
The first mistake is a much more serious one, because once the mistake has been made, one cannot undo it just by analysing the transliteration. One has to redo it.
When one has too many different characters, one may still decide later to consider several of them to be effectively the same.
Therefore, the safe way is to try to maintain the more 'obvious' differences.
It is clear that this is very subjective.
Some examples:
when making the v101 transliteration, GC decided that the various different forms of the curl on top of Sh is significant, so he distinguished them all.
Your third question is another example. Are bench characters beginning or ending with "i" significantly different from the ones with "c"?
We don't know.
One guideline might be to see to what extent the scribe seems to have made an effort to distinguish them.
This has not really been done consistently, and what we see may be misleading.
Effectively, the distinction between i and c shapes isn't always that clear. This is also true for r vs. s .
Other examples of relatively careless writing are a overlapping with o and even n overlapping with r .
Since we don't know the answer, one approach could be to state an assumption, and see where it leads.
This can create a lot of work, of course.
On your point 2, the o can appear at the start but also at the end, and so can a or y.
I have one hypothesis, unproven and very hard to prove except perhaps only by solving the entire text.
I included that in my music presentation of the last Voynich MS day,
This is that the gallows are ligatured variations of o+X+e.
Example: CKh is a ligatured variant of oke .
This is quite elegant as it 'explains' ALL possible pedestalled gallows.
OKe would also be oke but CKo would be oko
CK would be ok
etc...
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