The evolution of P/F vs T/K raises important questions

[cvetkakocj@rogers.com]

Most of medieval handwriting is very ambiguous and unless you know the language, you cannot read it. So, you cannot build transcription alphabet on ambiguous letter combinations.

The problem is that there is often no ambiguity in the definition of the symbols. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish r from s, but it is possible to do so. The shape of the symbols is quite stable throughout the text: p is p everywhere, e is e everywhere, ch is ch everywhere...

Even in EVA transliteration the ambiguity of the letterforms is pointed out for some words, however, there are a lot more ambiguous letters and letter combinations. The Voynich paleography is not as simple as ch is always ch, e is always e. Currier designated EVA e for c, because of the similarity of c and e. The experts are not yet clear if ee should be u or ee or cc. According to historical Latin writing, c was also like h and z. Because of that, there was a lot of confusion in the Middle Ages. Germans modified z by adding a tail, a horizontal line or a loop was added to e, a new form of h was invented to differentiate them from c. Yes, p was always the same, but it does not represent a nonsense, but rather a cluster marker, like German SW that was treated as one sound, written with two Latin letters.


You start developing the alphabet with clearly unambiguously written letters and try to compare them to the letters used in various medieval scripts in different languages. If the alphabet is correct, it will generate words in various languages, but most would indicate a possible language family. Then you examine the grammar of that language family and the way Latin letters are used in written and phonetic representation of that language. You start with the languages spoken in the Alpine region of central Europe and examine if any of its medieval grammatical features correspond to what has been observed in the Voynich manuscript, like the shape of letters, the writing convention, the prefixes and suffixes, the spaces, etc. Then you compare the various transliterations to the most likely word in the target language. Like the word POXLEBER, so often discussed on Ninja Forum. Most of the experts agree that P should be B, and X should be CH, although this is not a present German spelling. It was occasionally spelled that way in the Middle Ages.