RE: Voynich text generation
Mark Knowles > 18-04-2019, 05:09 PM
ReneZ: It seems to me, if I understand you correctly, that the issue with a Voynich transcription alphabet is that it is still tied to Voynich characters, so imposing the constraint that text matches the Voynichese exactly. Certainly the advantage of not using invented symbols is that one does not need to create one's own font for use, so there is a case for using an equivalent non-Voynich alphabet generated from more standard characters. However I wouldn't really want to use the complete latin alphabet in this respect as I think it could lead to confusion when mapping to the real alphabet; whereas by using invented symbols one is more detached. One advantage of using one's own set of symbols is that it is more compact than using a representation of a symbol like E134 as these would need to be comma separated anyway. Probably it helps to get into the mindset of the author and the process of character creation by using an invented character set as he/she would. This is assuming, as I believe, that this is a generated character set not one inherited in whole from another source like a language.
Still your point is taken and there are definitely situations where one would not want to use a made up character set. To me the ideal is a made up set of symbols which inevitably maps to an alphanumeric representation, necessary for coding purposes.