Re: EVA Transcription

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is a misunderstanding here about the EVA transcription.

Certainly, <iin> is, almost beyond doubt, a single letter. But so
are ch and rr in Spanish, to the very extent that they are
alphabetized separately from c and r. Likewise c'h in Breton,
and I could bring in Welsh and many more to witness' 
stand.

EVA is, in fact, nothing but Frogguy made pronounceable.
In being made pronouceable, EVA had to exchange numbers
for letters, e.g. 4 -> q, 8 -> d, 9 -> y; some letters had to
be exchanged for  others, e.g. c -> e, and some sequences,
especially the gallows (qp, lp, etc in Frogguy) had to be
turned into single letters (k, t).  If EVA has <in> for what is
clearly a single letter, it is only because its designers, quite
literally, ran out of pronounceable single letters and had to
make do with pronounceable groups of letters.

As for Frogguy, it never pretended to be a one-to-one
mapping of the Voynich true alphabet, mainly because we
do not know for sure what it is. Its only, and avowed purpose,
was to be easy to learn, difficult to forget, and the transcription
to look as much as possible like the Voynich original.

There are no assumptions there as to whether the VMS is a
cipher or plain text, or gibberish. As for those interpretations,
as they say that to a man with a hammer everything looks like
a nail...

1) to a linguist (e.g. yours faithfully) everything looks like a 
language

2) to a cryptologist everything looks like a cryptogram

and I cannot resist adding

3) to a botanist everything looks like a..... cryptogam!

However, let me qualify (1) above.  A simple substitution cypher
will still look like a language to me, but not a Vigeneres, let alone
the modern monsters, PGP, Blowfish, et al.

In fact, I was about to post something here about another text,
which has many of the properties of the VMS. It looks like
gibberish, there is documentary evidence that it is a sort of
glossolalia. So much so, in fact, that I had dismissed it as 
total garbage. Last week-end, I did a concordance of it, out of
misguided curiosity, I thought. Looking at the concordance,
comparing the text with a demonstrably false English 
"translation" of it, I saw some sense in there. The only thing
certain about it is that it is not a cipher.

I hope Gerry Kennedy is eavesdropping here... (Gerry, this is
only for your eyes: the text in question is known as Apai. It
is a recitation delivered by Ure Vaeiko to William Thomson
upon Thomson showing him a photograph of an Easter
Island tablet during his stay there in 1886 -- and I know what
you thought: "You're mad you bastard!" in Australian English
that is, us telepaths receive thoughts translated into the
local language :-)