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by ilzmastr 2109 days ago
It's not so easy to find a unicode transcription, but I would think that would be the first step in 2020. There is some info here [1] about such a transcription but it does not feel "definitive". Does anyone know if there is a copy paste-able transcription of the manuscript anywhere?

When linear B was decoded the first thing many researchers did was to transcribe every word they could get their hands on, then sort by beginnings and endings of words [2]. I suppose that is what the poster has done since they say there are no inflected word endings, but perhaps a cipher hides these, or they do not have enough data?

[1]: http://www.turkicresearch.com [2]: https://medium.com/@ilyakavalerov/greek-before-homer-how-lin...

2 comments

It's difficult if not impossible to transcribe something in an unknown writing system, since you can't even be sure which glyphs are the same. Wikipedia has a few attempts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#Transcripti...

There is a transliteration of the Voynich text at [1]. I have no way to judge how complete or accurate it is, but it appears to be a useful piece of work.

[1] http://www.voynich.nu/transcr.html

The most widely used transliteration, by Takahashi into EVA, is mentioned on that page, which is on Rene Zandbergen's web site. There was no intention of making EVA phonetically accurate, as we don't know how, if at all, the Voynich Manuscript text was supposed to be pronounced. However, it is reasonably pronounceable. You can find Takahashi's EVA transliteration at http://www.voynich.com/pages/PagesH.txt
For what it's worth, there has been some work on parsing Voynich words into syllables, which might be a more helpful level to work at.

"Taking into account words which couldn’t be syllabified (2.6%), words with more than three syllables (0.4%) and words with rank errors (1%) we can see that the Body Rank Order theory accounts for 96% of all word types with more than four tokens."

https://agnosticvoynich.wordpress.com/2019/05/06/a-new-word-...

It's well-known that there's a grammar of glyphs within "words" (i.e. groups of glyphs separated by spaces), but it's premature to identify syllables. Most words seem to have prefixes and suffixes, without anything in between.
As early as 1994, as recently updated as of 04/2020! Great link thank you!