Text Analysis - Transliteration of the Text

Introduction

The main mystery of the Voynich MS is clearly its unknown writing. This topic is addressed from three different aspects, on three (sets of) pages:

This page addresses the second part, the transliteration of the text. It summarises historical transliteration efforts and describes the present state of affairs. This page is very relevant for those who are interested in the interpretation of the Voynich MS text, but it can be skipped by those who are not.

A table at the bottom of this page explains where one may find the main transliteration files.

There is a second page addressing some more specific topics related to Voynich MS transliteration. Links are provided where relevant.

Purpose and terminology

The purpose of transliteration of the text is the conversion of the handwritten text of the Voynich MS into a computer-readable format (file). The aim of this is to allow computer software to analyse the text, for example in order to derive statistics or to aid the interpretation and ideally translation of the text.

Already in the 1976 seminar about the Voynich MS led by Mary D'Imperio (1) this process was called 'transcription' and to my best knowledge this term has been used ever since, in all discussions and publications about the MS. It has also been used throughout this web site until May 2019, when the difference between transcription and transliteration was clarified to me by a professional linguist (2). In his words:

Transcription means a transformation of a text such that it will be substituted by another text made by a well-known alphabet of phonetic symbols. This is only possible in case we already know how the text reads.
[...]
Transliteration is a symbol-by-symbol conversion of one script into another. Transliteration is used for practical purposes, but does not represent any hypothesis on the original pronunciation of the source text. The distinctive feature of transliteration is that it preserves the source text and is reversible. The phonetic data could be totally missing, or not yet available, or irrelevant.

The first time that this type of transliteration was exercised was by William Friedman after WWII, for processing by so-called 'tabulating machines'. Many years before that, in the 1930's, Fr. Th. Petersen of the Catholic University of America already made a complete hand-written copy of the MS using a complete photocopy of the MS and in some cases, in order to transliterate difficult parts, the actual MS. This document, in which he added many interesting annotations, is still preserved in the William F. Friedman collection of the Marshall Library in Lexington (Va) (3).

A transliteration should be clearly distinguished from a proposed translation of the text. The only purpose of a transliteration is to represent each handwritten character in the MS by a symbol in a computer-readable file in a consistent manner. It doesn't really matter which symbol is used for which character. Ever since the 1940's, different people have used different conventions, or transliteration alphabets.

History

FSG

The earliest well-known transliteration of large parts of the Voynich MS was made in the 1940's by the so-called First Study Group (FSG) of William Friedman, which was briefly described here. The group was working from photostatic copies of the pages of the MS, and they worked with a transliteration alphabet agreed by all members of the team. Because of the desire for secrecy by Friedman, for a very long time nobody outside his team was aware of this transliteration exercise or the alphabet they used.

The Friedman transliteration was never meant to be a complete transliteration of all text in the MS. They decided to concentrate on the linear text written in paragraphs, and not bother with the complicated diagrams with labels and text written in circles. This is very clear from handwritten annotatations made on the source copies saying "omit punch" or "punch just this".

The FSG transliteration alphabet uses capital letters and numbers. It has a rather unusual method (by later standards) for transliterating the 'intruding gallows', namely by using a dedicated symbol (Z) for the pedestal (ch).

The FSG transliteration effort is described in detail in Reeds (1995) (4). A printout of the transliteration was discovered by Jim Reeds in the above-mentioned Marshall library, and together with Jacques Guy he entered it in computer readable form. The resulting file is >> still available for downloading. This transliteration is not complete for the reasons mentioned above. It is one of the five main transliterations of the Voynich MS that is used at this site, and will be reffered to with the abbreviation FSG.

Bennett

In 1976 Prof. William R. Bennett of Yale University published a book on the use of the computer to analyse certain properties of language and text (5). In this book, he dedicated a chapter to an analysis of the Voynich MS text, and for this purpose he needed a transliteration alphabet. Bennett's alphabet has not been used outside of this publication. The transliteration was made from photographs and stored on paper tape. As reported by Brumbaugh (6), Bennett was assisted in his Voynich MS analysis by Jonina Duker, who was then a sophomore student (7).

Currier

Roughly at the same time, the cryptanalist Prescott Currier started a major transliteration effort, using an alphabet he designed independently. This alphabet uses the capital letters A-Z and the numbers 0-9 (i.e. all 36). It does not represent some characters which the FSG alphabet does, and it uses single characters for what appear to be composite characters in the MS. When Currier presented his findings at the 1976 Voynich MS symposium, Mary D'Imperio suggested that it would be important that all researchers use a unified alphabet. She had also started transliterating parts of the MS using her own alphabet, which she abandoned in favour of Currier's, and the two files were merged. The combined transliteration of Currier and D'Imperio, and the transliteration alphabet designed by Currier, have been used well into the 1990's, also in the earliest years of the internet. This is the second main transliteration used at this site, and in the following it will be referred to by the abbreviation C-D.

Table 1 below shows the three above-mentioned alphabets together.

Char	Bennett	FSG	Currier		Char	Bennett	FSG	Currier
	D	4	4			I	I	I
	O	O	O			IL	IE	G
	S	8	8			IIL	IIE	H
	G	G	9			IIIL	IIIE	1
	Z	2	2			IQ	IR	T
	L	E	E			IIQ	IIR	U
	Q	R	R			IIIQ	IIIR	0
	CT	T	S			U	L	D
	ET	S	Z			N	N(*)	N
	H	H	P			M	M(*)	M
	P	P	B			IM	IIIL	3
	K	D	F				K	J
	F	F	V				IK	K
	CHT	HZ	Q				IIK	L
	CPT	PZ	W				IIIK	5
	CKT	DZ	X				(6)	6
	CFT	FZ	Y				(7)	7
	A	A	A			Y	Y	(n)
	C	C	C			V	V	(v)

Table 1: definition of the main historic alphabets

(*) Note: Tiltman used the FSG alphabet, but instead of N and M wrote IL and IIL.

One thing that immediately appears from this table is that the various researchers did not agree on what constitutes a single character in the Voynich MS text.

Later, Jim Reeds showed that many characters in the Voynich MS cannot be represented exactly by any of the existing alphabets. There are some 'rare' characters, and in addition there are what appear to be ligatures of several characters. These characters have traditionally been called 'weirdoes', though here I will use the term 'rare characters'. Jim Reeds produced a document with an overview of these rare characters, calling them 'X1' to 'X128'. An excerpt of this little known document is shown below.
 

Table 2: early identification of unusual character combinations

Transliteration in the age of the WWW

With the emergence of the "World Wide Web" and the start of the Voynich mailing list, transliteration of the parts that were still missing from Currier's and D'Imperio's efforts was continued using Currier's alphabet. A number of characters using lower case were added to this alphabet. These are already included (in parentheses) in Table 1. As part of this new transliteration, which will be referred to as "Vnow", a file format for this transliteration file was adopted, about which more will be said further below.

In parellel to this, a completely new type of transliteration alphabet was designed:

Frogguy

The 'Frogguy' transliteration alphabet was designed by Jacques Guy in 1991. It uses lower-case characters, numbers and diacritical marks. Rather than representing complete characters, it represents the 'strokes' or minims of the script of the Voynich MS. As a result of this approach it manages to produce a reasonably close similarity between the script and the transliterated text. At the same time, some characters in the MS which may be assumed to be a single character are represented by several using this alphabet. By its nature, it is the first alphabet that allows to properly represent many of the ligatured characters that were mentioned above. Jacques Guy also introduced the so-called 'capitalisation rule' which means that a character that is connected to the following one should be represented by a capital letter. The Frogguy transliteration alphabet and its use are explained in more detail at a preserved copy of >> one of Jim Reeds' web pages. It may be of interest to show an example of this alphabet:

daiin qotedy dar ochol osaror
8aiiv     40qpc89   8a2   octox     osa2o2

An additional important contribution from Jacques Guy was a tool that allowed translation of transliteration files from one alphabet to another. This tool was called BITRANS, was written in Pascal and ran in DOS (it still would). It could handle complex translation rules, such as needed for the Currier alphabet, where, for example, the translation of the character i depends on context.

The Frogguy alphabet is the closest in appearance to the Voynich MS text, and it solves the main inconsistency of the Currier alphabet, namely that Currier synthesised strings of consecutive i characters into single characters, while this was not done for strings of consecutive e characters (8). However, it has a distinct disadvantage in that it is not very well suited for the type of numerical analysis mentioned at the top of this page, primarily because of its frequent use of the apostrophe, and to a lesser extent the mixture of letters and numbers. No signficant transliterations have been made using this alphabet.

When Gabriel Landini and myself embarked on a new transliteration of the MS, a project that we named "EVMT" at the time, we decided that a new alphabet, but one based on the principles of Frogguy, would be needed.

Landini-Zandbergen: Eva

EVA originally stood for European Voynich Alphabet, but later became 'Extensible Voynich Alphabet'. It was designed to be similar to Frogguy, but to use only alphabetical characters. It was designed by Gabriel Landini and myself with important contributions and suggestions from Jacques Guy. Its design was part of a larger scheme which included:

• The need to be able to represent the entire text of the Voynich MS, including previously missing parts, e.g. some of the text outside the standard paragraphs.
• Maintaining compatibility with the use of BITRANS.
• The alphabet had to be a superset of FSG, Currier and Frogguy, such that a conversion of all existing transliteration to Eva would be possible and reversible (9).
• A clear way to idenfity rare characters, such as in the list made by Reeds.
• Standardisation of the transliteration file format, including a standard way to identify the location of all text items in the MS (called loci in the following).
• The capability to design a True Type Font that accurately represents the Voynich MS text (10).

'Basic Eva' is the set of lower case characters that was identified, and 'Extended Eva' includes the representation of all types of rare characters. The basic Eva alphabet was chosen such that the transliterated text is almost pronouncible. This excellent idea from Gabriel was not to be able to 'speak Voynichese', but to make it very easy for the human brain to recognise and remember transliterated words.

The rare characters can be classified into three categories:

1. Unusual or rare single characters
2. Ligatures of only 'Basic Eva' characters
3. Ligatures including rare single characters

These were all identified in the course of the transliteration exercise, which was based on two documents: the Petersen handwritten copy of the MS already mentioned above (see note 3), and the Yale "copyflo" (11). As it turned out, there were three single characters that might be called unusual because they did not appear in any of the previously defined transliteration alphabets, but which occurred several times in the MS. These three characters: b, u and z were assigned their own 'Basic Eva' letter (b, u and z respectively). The table of Basic Eva is included here:

Table 3: definition of 'Basic Eva'

What appears from this table is that the characters in and iin that have typically been considered units, and transliterated as N and M in both FSG and Currier, are transliterated in Eva as "in" and "iin". It is very important to point out that Eva is not attempting to identify semantic units in the text. It simply represents in an electronic form the shapes that are seen in the MS. It is left to a later step by analysts to decide which combinations should be seen as units. There is probably no right answer to this question, and the problems how to transliterate these strings of minims is addressed in a dedicated area.

Strings of i's

While defining the alphabet, individual rare characters, or rare parts of ligatures, were assigned a 'high ASCII' code, and the way to include them into transliteration files is defined as follows: @185; for ascii code 185 (12). Table 4 shows all such rare characters addording to version 2 of the first complete definition (13).

Table 4: the 'Extended Eva' character set

This table has been re-drawn using the Eva Hand-1 font. The original table by G.Landini may be found here: IMG: Extended Eva character set.

Ligatures of characters may be represented in two ways. The first is the previously mentioned capitalisation rule introduced already by Jacques Guy. As Table 3 with the definition of basic Eva shows, this method allows an accurate representation of the text using the Eva True Type font. A capitalised character always connects to the next one. In addition, there are the following special cases:

• c / c and q / q already connect to the right, so there is no need to capitalise them
• h / h and H / H additionally connect to the left
• E / E connects at the bottom.

Often, the characters Sh, cTh, cKh, cPh and cFh are simply written as sh, cth, ckh, sph and cfh respectively. This is more convenient, but it has the result that their rendition in the True Type Font is sub-optimal.

The second way to indicate ligatures in transliteration files, which is more intuitive for the human reader, is to enclose the connected characters in curly brackets (14). Table 5 shows examples of this. The script representation in this table uses the capitalisation rule.

Table 5: use of ligatures and the capitalisation rule

¹ Example of standard though not optimal use.

Takeshi Takahashi

The Eva alphabet, primarily in its basic form, found great reception in the community, and it was used by the Japanese Takeshi Takahashi to produce a new transliteration, also based on the Yale "copyflo" (see note 11), which was the first that could be considered essentially complete. He used 'capitalised Eva' to represent all benched or pedestalled characters, e.g. 'Sh' for Sh. He has also updated his transliteration over time, based on reports from users. This is the third main transliteration at this site, and it is referred to by the abbreviation TT. It is published by Takeshi at his web site (for which see the table with links near the bottom of this page. Alternative forms derived from this are available in several places, see for example the following section.

The interlinear transliteration file

Based on an initial effort by Jim Reeds, Gabriel Landini collected the important older transliterations mentioned above into a single interlinear file, meaning that they were presented together line by line. They were all converted into Eva, since this conversion is consistent and reversible, as mentioned above.

The brazilian Jorge Stolfi took this interlinear file and put very significant effort into improving it, adding further transliterations. This included the complete transliteration of Takeshi Takahashi (status of 1999), where he converted the capitalised Eva to lower case. He also added his own transliterations and partial transliterations from several others, for example John Grove. As a result, this interlinear file has become the de facto source for transliteration data. In the following, it will be referred to as the Landini-Stolfi Interlinear file, with abbreviation LSI.

It includes in particular the above-mentioned version of the Takeshi Takahashi transliteration, as it was in 1999. This copy of the Takahashi transliteration will be referred to as IT.

The above-mentioned EVMT project was partially completed, and led to two complete, but different transliterations. Alignment of the two versions was started, but not completed. The resulting files, which may be referred to under the heading LZ, were never published.

At a later stage, and as will be explained further below, the Zandbergen part of this transliteration has been gradually improved, and is now publicly available. This is the fourth main transliteration used at this site, and it is referred to with the abbreviation ZL. I acknowledge the important influence of Gabriel Landini in creating this transliteration.

v101

A few years later, Glen Claston embarked on a complete transliteration of the Voynich MS and devised a transliteration alphabet which he called Voynich 101 (here v101 for short). The v101 alphabet was designed to keep stroke combinations that appeared to him to be single signs as single characters. Furthermore, it distinguishes between several variants of characters that were considered to be one and the same in all previous alphabets. He transliterated the entire text of the Voynich MS using this alphabet. Following is his definition of the alphabet, and allocation to ASCII values.

Table 6: the v101 basic character set

Table 7: the v101 extended character set

These tables have been re-drawn using the v101 font. The original tables by GC may be found here: IMG: v101 keyboard assignments , IMG: v101 extended glyphset.   (15)

Also for the v101 alphabet a True Type font has been designed, and like the Eva font it allows high-quality rendition of the Voynich MS text in electronic documents (HTML, Word). Also this font can be downloaded at the site map. This is the fifth main transliteration used at the site, and in the following, it will be indicated by the abbreviation GC.

Summary - status around 2017

Achievements

Several independent transliterations of the Voynich MS are available. Among the ones listed above there are a few that are almost complete:

• The Landini-Zandbergen ("LZ") transliteration, which was, however, never published.
• The Zandbergen-Landini ("ZL") file, which has been extracted from this.
• Takeshi Takahashi's transliteration ("TT").
• The Landini-Stolfi Interlinear ("LSI") file. The (older) version of the transliteration by Takeshi Takahashi, that is included in it ("IT"), is by itself almost complete.
• The v101 transliteration by Glen Claston ("GC").

Problem areas

Transliteration of the Voynich MS is particularly difficult, because one cannot read the text. One has no help from context. The biggest problem is to decide whether two almost-similar-looking written shapes are two different ones, or two representations of the same one, where the variation is just caused by handwriting variations. While transliterating, one is continually forced to make such decisions, and it is unavoidable that these are subjective.

A similar problem exists in deciding about word spaces. Sometimes, characters are offset just a bit and it is hard to decide whether there is a space or not. Traditionally, word spaces have been indicated by a period (.) in transliteration files, while whitespace is irrelevant and used occasionally to improve the layout. Even the introduction of the comma to represent an uncertain space does not completely resolve this problem.

One way out of both these problems would be to have these decision made more objectively, i.e. by a piece of software (OCR) but it will take a bit more time before we can do this.

A second general problem is the lack of standards. As mentioned above, the transliteration files all have rather significant differences in format. There is no place where they are all collected together. Of the interlinear file there are also several versions. Takeshi Takahashi's transliteration is represented in HTML format, separated into individual web pages for each MS page. This makes it very suitable for browsing, but less for text processing.

Until the year 2017 it was impossible to present the "GC" transliteration in any of the standard formats, because many of the symbols that have a special meaning for annotation in the "LSI" (and the "LZ") file are representations of Voynich MS text characters in the "GC" transliteration. A solution to this problem had to be found.

It is almost always impossible to repeat analyses done by others since one doesn't know which data they used, and there isn't really any clear way how they could have specified it. The file format(s) used nowadays are far removed from modern representation standards. Already more than a decade ago, Rafał Prinke suggested the use of TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) but it never took off. There are a few more comments about this general topic on the final page of this site, and a more detailed description of the problem and its resolution is provided on a separate page:

Next-generation transliteration of the text

Common transliteration file format

For analysis of the various Voynich MS text transliterations, it is highly desirable that these transliterations are contained in files with a well-defined (standardised) format. Such files should be 'annotated', meaning that they include so-called metadata, which is not the text itself, but information about the text. This metadata should indicate, for example, for each particular piece of text on which folio or page it is located, and where it is on the page. This location information was called the "locus", a term that I shall continue to use. Additional relevant information about the pages or the text may be included. Analysis software should be able to either interpret this information or to ignore it.

In the earliest days of the internet, when the transliteration by Currier was being extended, a format was agreed for this new file. This format was extended in the course of the EVMT transliteration by Gabriel Landini and myself. It was further modified by Jorge Stolfi, and used in this final version in the main resource: the Stolfi-Landini interlinear file. Unfortunately, the differences between the above three formats are quite significant, and the v101 transliteration file uses yet another, completely different representation.

To rectify this rather chaotic situation, in 2017 I decided to define a common file format that would be able to host all existing transliterations. As a first step, and as mentioned already above, I took my own part of the EVMT transliteration effort, which I have since called the Zandbergen-Landini (ZL) file, as one of the inputs to this process, in order to also make it publicly available. In order to be able to represent all existing transliterations in their own original transliteration alphabet, using a single file format, a number of issues had to be resolved. This activity is described here in considerable detail, and the remainder of this chapter is a summary of that.

The activity was completed in three stages:

In this exercise, I used the "IT" version of Takeshi Takahashi's transliteration, i.e. the version included in the LSI file. Stage 2 was a complicated process of comparing the transliteration files with each other and with the manuscript images, in order to consolidate what are the different text items, and in which order they should be presented. In stage 3, especially the v101 alphabet caused some clashes with symbols used for annotation in the LSI file, which had to be resolved.

The result of this exercise was the definition of a new format, which I have called IVTFF (Intermediate Voynich Transliteration File Format). Table 8 summarises the conventions used for this format. The complete format description (version 2.0 of February 2023) is presented in this PDF document. The description of the previous version (version 1.7 of April 2020) is still preserved on a page with some legacy items.

Table 8: main elements of the IVTFF format definition

There are three types of locus indicators:

Table 9: the IVTFF locus definition (format)

All loci have been classified into four main types, each with different sub-types. The main type is a capital letter, while the sub-type can be a number or a lower-case letter. Tools may select loci based on the main type (1-char) or the full type (2-char). Following is a summary of these loci, with a representative (but incomplete) list of sub-types. More details are available on the dedicated page (16).

Table 10: IVTFF locus types (type of text)

The five main files (FSG, Currier/D'Imperio, Takahashi, Zandbergen-Landini and Claston) have all been converted to the new format, and they can be retrieved through links provided in a table near the bottom of this page.

The main metadata included in these files are the types of each locus, and a classification of each page according to several criteria. To pre-process all files in IVTFF format, a tool called IVTT is available. This tool can remove any combination of this metadata, but also select/delete parts of the text based on any combination of this metadata.

Voynich Transliteration Tool

Superset of all transliteration alphabets

Introduction

Having all transliterations in a single standard format is clearly a great advantage, but it is still cumbersome, if not impossible, to compare the transliterated text contained in any two files in detail. For that, it would be helpful if they were all represented in the same transliteration alphabet. This principle was already explored on the parallel page with special topics.

In 2019 I decided to go ahead and define a Super Transliteration Alphabet according to this principle. The concept is explained by the following figure.

Figure 1: the hierarchical relationship between existing transliteration alphabets

It shows the dependencies of all main transliteration alphabets that are discussed at this site. The arrows both mean: "is based on" and "fully includes", in the sense that the 'higher' alphabet can fully represent texts expressed in the 'lower' alphabet. In the opposite direction this is generally not the case. The figure shows that it is sufficient to make a superset of Extended Eva and v101, as this automatically captures all other alphabets.

The process of creating this superset is explained in considerable detail on a dedicated page, and the following is a summary of this. This work was first presented at the 2022 Voynich MS Conference, as the first keynote talk on 30 November: "Transliteration of the Voynich MS text" (17).

Main problems to resolve

To set up this alphabet, two major and several minor decisions had to be made. The first major decision was whether this new alphabet should be more synthetic like Currier or v101, or more analytical, like Eva. It was decided to make the STA alphabet synthetic, as the split of v101 characters into basic components was initially considered to be too subjective. For the conversion from extended Eva to a synthetic STA, this implied the lengthy, but straightforward task of finding all possible combinations of Eva text fragments in the ZL transliteration that compose the v101 characters and any other composites.

The second major decision was how to represent the characters in the new alphabet. With Eva and v101 both having of the order of 200 characters, the combination would certainly have even more. Since the use of high-ascii is deprecated in any case, a single character will not be enough to represent each character, so it was decided to represent all Voynich characters in STA by two Ascii characters. For this, all characters in the Voynich MS have been subdivided into groups, which will be called character families in the following.

Characters that appear similar will be part of the same family. Families are identified by a single capital letter. The specific characters in each family will be called family members and are identified by a second character, where frequent characters are identified by a digit (1-9) and the rare ones by a lower-case character (a-z).

Both the identification of the different families, and the list of members in each family, has been achieved through an iterative process. This would have been an impossible task without a tool that converts transliterations between different alphabets. This tool, "bitrans", is introduced in more detail on another page. This tool will also be of significant use for future users of the STA transliteration files.

The list of families with the most important family members is shown in this PDF document. Inevitably, there could be many other equivalent results, but some of the main reasons for this design stem from the Voynich MS text complications mentioned before. Much more information about these aspects is provided on the dedicated page.

The resulting alphabet

The full STA definition (after 16 intermediate versions) is provided in this PDF document. An example of Voynich MS text expressed in STA is included in Figure 2. The top row includes a short line of writing that was taken from the fifth line of f36v.

Figure 2: an example of a transliteration in STA

The second row shows the representation of this line in five different original transliterations, using their 'native' alphabets, but already represented in the IVTFF file format. In the bottom row all text has been converted to the STA transliteration alphabet. Here, grey boxes indicate the remaining differences between the various transliterations. This demonstrates two aspects. The first is, that this transliteration is not suitable for human reading, but only for computer processing. The second is, that transliterations will tend to be consistent in the choice of character family, but mostly differ in the choice of family member for each character.

The extent of the main transliterations in terms of number of STA characters is included in Table 11 below.

Table 11: sizes of the main transliteration files in terms of nr. of STA characters

Usage of the STA alphabet and STA-encoded files

All transliteration files have been converted to STA, and links to the resulting files are provided below Table 12.

It must be stressed that the STA alphabet has not been designed in order to be the new alphabet that shall replace all other (native) alphabets. Use of these files is complicated by the fact that all characters are encoded as two bytes, which require dedicated tools. It may be assumed that most if not all existing user analysis tools expect single-byte encoding of Voynich MS characters. Also, most users will not be interested in processing a text in which several hundred different characters are recognised.

Instead, STA is primarily an intermediate representation, that has the main advantage that all existing translations can be represented using it. All processing of STA files can now be done for all files in an identical manner. A first processing step will typically be one of simplification, i.e. reduction of the alphabet to a smaller size. This can be done using bitrans or other user-developed tools. As an example, a bitrans table ("rules file") to convert STA to 'nearest equivalent basic Eva' (a significant simplification) is already available here. Users are encouraged to define their own transliteration alphabets, which can then be used by converting any existing transliteration to it (see below schematic).

Figure 3: ways to set up a transliteration file in one's own alphabet

A second superset, this time analytical

In 2023, while working on alignment of the two most complete and accurate transliterations: ZL and v101, in order to create some kind of optimal combination, I realised that for this application an analytical 'super'-alphabet would be more appropriate. Since bitrans allows an easy definition of new alphabets, it was decided to set up this 'analytical alignment alphabet', or 'aaa' specifically for this purpose.

All details are provided on a dedicated page.

With this new alphabet it was possible to create the above-mentioned combined transliteration which will henceforward be referred to as the 'Reference Transliteration'. It is less intended to be most accurate in the identification of the individual characters (which in any case cannot be achieved by an automated comparison), but primarily aims at representing all characters in the text. This may also not have been achieved completely, but the file at version 1a may be considered a good first iteration.

Location of main transliteration resources

Following are links to the original transliteration resources that are known to me, and to the new copies in IVTFF format. The most recent format version is 2.0. Links to files in the previous format version (1.7) will continue to be provided in this table for a limited period of time. The reference transliteration is also inclduded using code 'RF'.

For older (legacy) versions see here.

Table 12: links to the main transliteration files

A table with links to transliteration files using the STA1 alphabet is provided here.

Table 13 below summarises some of the properties of those transliteration files that are available in the IVTFF format, with some explanatory notes below the table.

Table 13: some properties of the main transliteration files

In this table, long words is the number of words in case uncertain spaces are not counted.

Due to the differences in the three nearly complete transliterations (IT, ZL, GC), no consolidated paragraph count exists today, so these have not (yet) been included in the Reference transliteration.

The number of characters is based on the STA1 alphabet. Unknown characters (STA code Z1) are counted as 1. Sequences of unknown characters are also counted as 1.

The FSG file only has very few alternative readings, for cases where two punched records for the same locus exist.

The RF file is only provided in basic Eva, so does not have high Ascii codes. However, when represented in extended Eva, it would include many.

The >>Voynich Information Browser by Elias Schwerdtfeger allows extraction of individual transliterations from the "LSI" file, with many useful options.

Notes

1

See D'Imperio (1976).

2

I am grateful to prof. Artemij Keidan of the Sapienza University in Rome. His interesting paper refuting the incorrect proposed solution to the Voynich MS by G. Cheshire included clear statements about this terminology, which he was later able to clarify to me in great detail.

3

It is contained in items 1615.1 and 1615.2 of the William F. Friedman collection. For more about the Marshall Library, see here.

4

See Reeds (1995).

5

See Bennett (1976).

6

See Brumbaugh (1978).

7

I am grateful to Jonina Duker for her recollections of these events of 40 years ago.

8

Of course, we have no way of knowing whether either assumption is correct or not.

9

On the other hand, it should be clear that not all features of a transliteration made directly in Eva can be converted into the older transliteration alphabets in a reversible manner.

10

Such a font has been designed by Gabriel Landini, and is used extensively at this web site. See the site map.

11

A black-and-white printout of a microfilm made in the 1970's, see also here.

12

This originally used the more intuitive ampersand, as in: &185; but in the 2017 conversion exercise described in the following this had to be changed. See also here.

13

Some characters have been moved when changing from v1 to v2: 173 to 240, 141-144 to 241-244 and 157-158 to 245-246.

14

This used to be between parentheses but in the 2017 conversion exercise described in the following this had to be changed. See also here.

15

Characters "O", "=", "@" and high Ascii 152, 157, 159, 160 and 205 have not been assigned. Characters 172, 182, 195 and 216 have been assigned, but do not appear in the transliteration file. Character 167 was omitted in GC's original table. It is used in the transliteration file.

16

See also the page about the writing system.

17

See Zandbergen (2022). Note that the STA version presented on this web page (and generally at this web site) is a further evoltion of the one used at the time of this presentation.

18

Extracted from the LSI file and converted back to the FSG alphabet. Checked against the original and against the full ZL transliteration.

19

Converted from the original. Now using the full IVTFF v.1.7 convention, but final verification will still be conducted.

20

Extracted from the LSI file and converted back to the Currier alphabet. It turns out that the LSI file was incomplete, so this has to be re-done. Important, since this file was used by Reddy and Knight, and part of it by Hauer and Kondrak.

21

The "IT" version has been extracted from the LSI file, and represents the state of this transliteration in 1999. The more up to date "TT" version still has to be processed.

22

This file has been generated automatically.

23

Version 3a has the same text as version 2b, with one exception: an old (invalid) use of * to indicate an unreadable character in fRos locus 36 has been corrected. Version 2b was a minor correction of version 2a, only affecting the $I page variable setting on some of the text-only pages. Version 2a had the same text as the previous version (1r). Versions 2a and 2b used IVTFF file format 1.7, including paragraph start markers and LFD hands in variable $H.

24

Version 2a has the same text as 1b, but the formatting has been cleaned up to conform to the IVTFF 2.0 standard. Version 1b was a minor correction of version 1a, only affecting the $I page variable setting on some of the text-only pages. Version 1a had the same text as the previous version (0c). Versions 1a and 1b used IVTFF file format 1.7, including paragraph start markers and LFD hands in variable $H.

25

The "Reference" transliteration is an automatically-generated combination of the ZL and GC files. Its original version uses the STA1 alphabet. As a result of this merging process, it includes some STA codes that are only defined in extended Eva, and some that are only defined in v101. It cannot therefore be expressed completely in either of these alphabets. The version presented here is an approximation in 'nearest basic Eva', which allows easy handling by all users.