European Voynich Alphabet

The European Voynich Alphabet, or EVA was created by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini in 1998 as a system to transcribe the various graphemes ("letters") which make up the text of the Voynich manuscript into Roman characters.

With EVA, every Voynich sign is represented by a roughly similar-looking letter of the Latin alphabet. For example, the Voynich symbol is assigned to the Roman character "p". Thus, the Voynich Manuscript can be translated into a computer-readable form which allows for ready statistical analysis (frequency of individual letters, relationships of letters to each other, etc.). As a side effect, EVA-transcription makes it possible to discuss strings of the Voynich text via email or on the Web.

One of the aspects in the choice of which Voynich grapheme should be represented by which letter, was readability of the transcribed words. It is possible to "read" the better part of EVA-transcribed text aloud, as the transcription results typically in strings like "qocheedy daiin". (It is unclear in how far the fact that this is possible at all points to features of the underlying "source language" or the enciphering mechanism.)

Since the Voynich manuscript alphabet is unknown, it's often questionable whether two differing symbols actually describe two different graphemes, or whether they are only variants of the same grapheme. EVA has been attacked on this grounds as discarding subtle grapheme details which may be relevant to understanding the text. Other criticism focused on the fact that for the sake of readability, visual similarity has been lost. (This means that the latin letters chosen don't always resemble their Voynich counterparts visually, and thus are more difficult to memorize.)

There are several other transcription schemes for the Voynich manuscript, but EVA is still the most widespread. In email conversations, strings of EVA characters are conventionally enclosed in angle brackets, like "".

External links

* [http://www.voynich.nu/extra/eva.html The Voynich Manuscript]
* [http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/francais/voynich/outils/evah1_1.zip True type и Type 1 fonts of European Voynich Alphabet]
* [http://voynichcentral.com/transcriptions/Voynich-101 "Voynich 101"] , a recent alternative transcription system