not<\/em> as unusual as many people have suggested.<\/p>\nYou can search all over the world for that elusive “alphabet” without finding it. In fact, I did exactly that. Even though I recognized these shapes as Latin, I wanted to be sure I had not overlooked anything and spent two years learning dozens of foreign alphabets (Armenian, Syriac, Gujarati, Georgian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, etc., in addition to the ones I already knew… Korean, Japanese, Russian and a tiny bit of Chinese), well enough to read simple words… and then came back to where I started\u2014almost all the VMS glyphs are normal Latin scribal repertoire, and the few that are questionable are similar to Greek conventions or could reasonably be constructed from Latin scribal building blocks put together in a slightly unconventional and yet acceptable way.<\/p>\n
Understanding scribal conventions might help sort out which variations in VMS shapes are meaningful and which are not. For example, in Latin, you can draw the tail on EVA-m in any direction without changing the meaning, but if you change the left-hand side, it becomes another syllable. In Latin, the 9 shape can be drawn any way you want, as long as it is vaguely 9-shaped, but if you move it from the end of the word to the beginning, you change the meaning. VMS glyphs might follow similar concepts even if different meanings have been assigned.<\/p>\n
Summary<\/h4>\n
I<\/span>f some of the VMS glyphs are abbreviations, it creates one-to many relationships of varying lengths. If this were a substitution code, this, in itself, would not be unduly difficult for cryptanalysts to unravel, but in medieval times there was another twist\u2014scribal abbreviations commonly represented not only several letters, but often different letters in each word<\/em>. In this way, scribal abbreviations diverge from typical one-to-many\/many-to-one diplomatic ciphers, in that the interpretation<\/em> of a specific shape can change from one word to the next.<\/p>\nIn Latin, and possibly also in the VMS, two words can look the same, but mean something different.<\/p>\n
J.K. Petersen<\/em><\/p>\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Medieval alphabets, numbers, and abbreviations are often the same shape. For example, the glyph identified in the VMS as EVA-l (ell) was used as both a number and as a scribal abbreviation. In the previous blog, I described the “is” glyph, which is used to create syllables such as ris, tis, or cis. This time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,6,5],"tags":[217,285],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6249"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6249"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6528,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6249\/revisions\/6528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}