ANCIENT BATH GLYPH NOT THERE HOW TO

Some years ago, when I was looking up the history of pilcrows and gathering samples (which took a couple of years), I also collected examples of Greek and Latin abbreviations and number systems because many of them resemble gallows characters.Įarly on I was insisting that almost all the VMS characters are based on Latin (with a few on Greek) and there was a lot of resistance to the idea (I got some “interesting” email). I don’t know whether v and w are meant to represent two different characters, but I think the distinction between “n” and “v” in the transcript is important, as I’ll explain farther along.

Notice how the tail loops back farther on the one that resembles “w”. But then how can you tell the difference between v or w if there are one, two, or more minims preceding them? This is something I pondered for a long time and I think the answer (at least for this scribe) might be the length of the tail. Notice how strongly the character normally referenced as “n” (in daiin) resembles a v or a w? This is how I transcribed them. There’s another distinctive aspect of Voynichese that inspired me to create my own transcript and my own fonts. The “is” shape occurs in EVA-m and gallows characters and sometimes the letters with “is” are written almost like short gallows, suggesting they might be related. There’s a good example on the far right (marked with a red arrow) in which the first curve is clearly separated from the “is” shape (“is” is a Latin symbol that looks like a short cursive ell). Or maybe there’s a completely different interpretation (that I’ll discuss later).Īnother thing I noticed on this folio is the greater tendency of the scribe to separate the component shapes of a glyph. If this were Latin, for example, one might mean -us and the other -um, or one might mean -us or -um and the other might mean -bus. For example, when they are at the ends of words (which happens frequently when the d is paired with EVA-y), maybe the two shapes are meant to be read as two different endings.

But I still treat them the same most of the time, as they seem to fall into similar patterns. I have often wondered whether a rounded “d” and a straight “d” are different glyphs, and created two different characters in my transcript to record them. In the following illustration, there are several instances of EVA-d with a straight stem (marked in red), and certain glyphs with greater separations between their component shapes (marked in blue):

ANCIENT BATH GLYPH NOT THERE HOW TO

Interpretation of VMS glyphs is something I’ve wanted to write up for a long time but I wasn’t sure how to express it in a way that was sufficiently clear, until I realized the hand on folio 95v1 might help me illustrate the concepts.

It was clearly the same style of writing (perhaps a blood relation of the original scribe?), but not the same hand. It was not just scribal haste or fatigue-the spacing, rhythm, and slant were different, as were some of the letter forms. When I was creating a VMS transcript, I noticed immediately the change in handwriting partway through the big-plants section on folio 26r.

Ancient bath glyph not there