To my friends I offer my affection, and to my detractors I freely give a deeper affection - for my friends only mimic the fabric of my mind, while my detractors participate in the shaping of it.
Not one to keep an accurate track of time, it's been awhile since I first posted my perceived problems with the EVA transcription project. I believe I protested against the "parsing" of the Voynich script into the minute characters that have become the signature of this site. The EVA project was in full swing, and as much as they attempted to incorporate my specific objections, nevertheless the project seems to have reached its own personal objectives, and on a congratulatory note I applaud anyone reaching their intended goal.
When I stop applauding is when I start receiving e-mail with words like Qoteedy or daiin, etc., that have no meaning, inside the Voynich or out. It seems you have a whole new group of researchers discussing this as if this was the only way to read the Voynich text, and I submit you've done a great dis-service to prior and future researchers in your effort. More precisely, I submit that your effort is not yet completed, as you have yet to run statistical analysis and set each "combination of strokes" as a true character in the final analysis.
You do not build a proper alphabet based on the "Newbold" strokes of a Frogguy alphabet, as I objected earlier. Your effort is immense, and I am in awe, but you have not finished your job - the task of mathematically reconstructing the proper character to create the "most probable" alphabetic reconstruction of the Voynich. If you had, I wouldn't have to suffer "daiin" for what is obviously nothing more than "am" in proper Voynich script.
No offense against Jacques intended, but the Voynich is a cryptographic manuscript, not a linguistic endeavour, and to follow his guideline is to mislead yet another generation in their quest.
But I am not alone here. Even as the EVA was being perfected, there were means in the works to alter your translation into "readable" text- "readable" being the operative word in rendering meaningful statistics. Even now there is a great question on the meaning of individual EVA passages. If you have indeed hit upon the right transcription, why the dissention? We're not arguing over the meaning of individual characters here, the argument and dissention is over the entire transcription system itself.
I have a "new" idea that might suit the average person - to Hades with Frogguy - and don't abandon the original text. The early transcribers saw certain characters not as combinations of strokes but as actual characters, and why parse an "a" into two pen-strokes when everyone knows it is indeed an "a"? Why do that to an "m"? I see no difference between the philosophy of Newbold and that of Jacques, and I'd remind Jacques exactly how well Newbold was received.
The elder of you will defend that you have tools to "translate" from one script to another, but that is no defense against what the EVA is impressing on the newer students to this manuscript, and in retrospect is no defense against what you yourselves have allowed to creep in as "scholarly" pursuit of what is prima facia much simpler than you imply.
Take it for what you consider it's worth, but I warned you on the outset, and I warn you now. You do not wish to abandon such an effort, nor do you wish to convert it mid-stream, but your heart of hearts tells you that I will warn you yet again, and each time my warning will increase in its credibility. Make your amends, gentlemen.
GC
The crux of the problem is modern transcription, and we find on examination that earlier transcribers were far more correct than we. EVA was born of the linguist mind and the mal-formation of Frogguy, a parsive, dissuasive and most destructive interpretation of the original intention. To their credit