VMs: Weirdoes, ligatures

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all

re-reading my previous mail, I realise it's not
perfectly unambiguous.

Without wanting to push for the use of EVA, 
in perpetuity and throughout the universe,
as the only possible transcription language
of the VMS, it is worth pointing out that it
can do more than most  people realise. And
that may be shown with the same example.

If a word in the VMs looks like qokeey, but the
two e-s are actually connected (at the bottom)
then it can be written qok(ee)y , which, I think
is rather clear. To have it come out ligatured
in the TT font, one should write instead:
qokEey. This is not so intuitive, but works.
VTT is a tool that can convert between the two
representations.

Of course, one can also write qokchy if they are
connected at the top, which has always been
believed to be a single, and different character,
but, hey, what do we know in the end?

The 'weirdoes' in the VMs, some of which are
abnormal shapes of 'normal' characters, should
be entered as a numerical sequence, for
example o&134;al, which would be a weird form
of ofal. These can also be part of ligatures,
e.g. (c&134;h)al which looks a bit like (cfh)al
To have this come out in the TT font, one needs
to replace the &134; sequence by the corresponding
single-character ASCII code, which can also be
done by VTT. 

The table at
 http://www.voynich.nu/extra/eva.html

which lists the weirdo codes identified so far 
still has quite a bit of free space.

Cheers, Rene

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