Transliteration fun

[ReneZ]

When I wrote elsewhere:

In fact I have other things to do that I consider more interesting, and I want to finish first.

no mystery was implied. I am having some 'fun' with the existing transliterations of the Voynich MS. All sorts of interesting things are coming out of that, and they will be written down somewhere soon.

One example is that my own transliteration ('ZL'), which was done in Eva, is much closer to the v101 transliteration which was done in GC's alphabet than to Takeshi Takahashi's transliteration which was again in Eva. I will be able to quantify this at some point.

Another interesting thing lies in the 'rare characters'. We are all used to seeing the examples of what appear to be badly-formed characters, or apparent corrections, in the many posts from Wladimir. But there are other cases as well. Just to give one example... (and referring to this page:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )

The extended Eva table has a character with code 203, which is also found in the v101 table with code 169.
This is a character that appears exactly once in the entire text, and it is in a clearly 'legible' part, namely the 8th line of f22r.

   

This is not an isolated case, and it is of interest to try to imagine what the existence of such characters tells us.
The clear execution shows that it was meant to look like this, and it is sufficiently different from other characters to
be sure it is not a 'mistaken identity'.

[Wladimir D]

The simplest (but in my opinion, erroneous explanation) is a badly written l -EVA , when the end of the second stroke is not brought to the substring.

I interpolate this glyph according to “transcription in elementary strokes”, as i + ך. Other examples are code 166-V101 (163- eva)  (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  ) , and two more cases as the right foot of a bench.

[Helmut Winkler]

EVA 203 is not  a character by itself, this is  a minim with the well known little hook over it, when you look, you can see the (very small) gap between them, it really is four minims with the common florish in the end and the littke hook over the first minim.

[-JKP-]

It appears to me that way as well, Helmut, although I really can't tell if it's meant to cover one minim or two (and it didn't matter to some scribes, these symbols were sometimes quite a distance from the missing letters).

I think there may be other places where the "cap" (the shape similar to an apostrophe) has been places over glyphs other than EVA-sh, but I did not record these instances when I was creating my transcript. The straight macron is found in a few places as well, most often over the 4o pattern.

[Helmut Winkler]

JKP,

you are quite right when you say that 15th c. scribes did not take much care where the put their abbr. signs.

As I have said before. one of the most outstanding features of the ms.  is the lack of abbreviation signs and I suspect there is a reason, when they are there.

The cap, "das Häubchen" looks to me very much like the caret or circumflex of comtemporary Greek mss., if this has a special meaning I don't know

[-JKP-]

I've been trying to collect samples of 15th-century scribes who used this particular shape somewhat habitually. I have found a number of them, but I often don't look at what I have until I've been gathering them for a few years, so I do not always know what I have until I sit down and study it. It's possible there are some regions where the curved shape was more common than others.

I was careful, when I sampled them, to distinguish between the v'sus (v[er]sus) apostrophe and a more general shape, since the "er" apostrophe (the one that sometimes is drawn as a squiggle or smoke shape) is also sometimes drawn as a simple curve shape.

[ReneZ]

I may not have gotten my point across very well.

My question was not what this symbol means. It could be a simple character or a composite one.

The point is that it is very clear and deliberate and it occurs exactly once among approx. 160,000 symbols.
There are similar cases, e.g. the first character in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 2:

   

or the first in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. line 15:

   

What is the mechanism whereby such individual characters appear?

[-JKP-]

I wasn't arguing what it means. I have no idea what it means.

But what I see in Post #1 is not a single character, but a minim with a "cap" shape, just as EVA-sh is like EVA-ch with a cap shape. It happens to be low enough to touch the minim:

   


In other words, we were talking about how to interpret the shape (not the meaning).

And when I have been searching for it in medieval manuscripts, I am also looking for the shape (and its usual position). I make no assumptions about what it means in the VMS. In Latin it's an apostrophe, in VMS, who knows.


Your subsequent examples are good because there aren't other precedents in the manuscript to explain them. Minim + cap can account for the first one. But the latter ones are not as easily explained (unless it's EVA-s reversed).

By the way... oddballs tend to show up at the beginnings and ends of lines quite often (as though they were added later, or by one of the other scribes, or for some other purpose).

[Helmut Winkler]

Well, my personal opinion is that these symbols are EVA-s and nothing singular. But this is not an answer to your question. I think there is no mechanism. In my opinion it is a misapprehension to think there is a mechanism like a cipher algorithm or the autpcopying thing or to look for one, it will get you nowhere. The only 'mechnism' is the writing habits of te scribe.

[nablator]

In Latin it's an apostrophe

Apostrophes in Latin?