The Voynich Ninja

Just to clarify, I didn't say student  I said that to wipe so legibly, so small  the scribe must have been relatively young. I have good eyesight for my age (late thirties) but it wouldn't occur to me to write so small ;I don't think that I could ; and it is difficult for me to read that text.

I mean "student" as a "learner" in the wider sense, probably not a child. But yes, in the VM in general I see a lot of things which might be explained from a learning perspective.

I wonder if the somewhat awkward Latin script may have something to do with the difference between document hands and book hands? Someone trained in one learning the other and having a go at it on a blank piece of parchment? From what I gather, there seems to have been a divide between the two.

On the other hand, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. they list some properties of a "personal cursive" script, which include:

• the letter forms can be somewhat variable
  
• Ascenders of letter such as b, h, k and l tend to be closed loops
  
• p is open at the top
  
• The letter a is the simple single chambered form...
  

So probably this is just someone's personal hand, which may mean that it will be hard to find decent matches in normal manuscript texts. But rather in marginalia, as Nick demonstrated.

Thank you, Koen!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., by John Paston II, 1475 ca, England, is an interesting manuscript. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. says that it is of a "relatively informal nature". My impression is that the Voynich Latin script is much more formal: character shapes are regular and characters are typically separated from each other. Paston's script seems "cursive" in both the meanings mentioned above: the pen is rarely lifted from the sheet and it has a "messy" feel that seems to derive from being written quickly. In my opinion, the Voynich Latin script is neither strongly connected nor has a hasty look: it is a Cursiva (because of the loops and single-compartment a) but not cursive (in those two meanings); it appears to have been written slowly and carefully, like the main body of unreadable text. For instance, note how consecutive loops overlap in Paston's detail lines 2 and three and how differently they are treated in Voynich f17r.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has an example of a 1500 "quite formal" notarial script from Italy. I think the comparison can help formulating an opinion about the degree of formality of the Voynich Latin script.

Looking at it that way, I think you're right Marco.

By the way, I sent a mail to the admin of that site, a dr in paleography, asking her opinion strictly about the Latin text of the Marginalia and strictly from a paleography perspective. She answered that basically she wants nothing to do with the VM. It looks like decades of theorists have severely damaged our chances of gaining more external specialist opinions

As far as classifying scripts, paleography is a grayscale. There are many hybrid scripts, and every writer had individual habits.

The Book hands (more formal handwriting) are more easy to recognize (and more consistent) because books were mostly written by trained scribes (many of whom traveled), or at scriptoria. The French manuscripts from the late 1400s are good examples. The same is true of the clerical hands used for legal documents. But the handwriting in books can vary quite a bit because scholars copied each other's manuscripts so they could have a copy.

Cursive hands probably varied the most because school notes or personal memoirs didn't have to meet any professional standards—they were written for the use of the writer. Some are barely legible.


But to get to the VMS...

One of the most distinctive letters in the VMS marginalia is the letter "g". It has an elegant down-left-pointing oval for the loop, an s-curve tail that does not loop back onto the top loop, and an add-on lowered serif. All these characteristics are less common in cursive hands (writing it this way is slower), but can be found in book hands. However, book hands (those with serifs and calligraphic thick and thin balance) don't match well to the marginalia when all the letters are considered together.

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Here are some samples of letters that match fairly well to the marginalia (for scripts that score at least 70 or higher out of 120 in terms of similarity to the VMS). As can be seen in the first row, the letter "g" in similar scripts can sometimes be distinctly different.

The number above each sample is the approximate date (bibliographers and historians are unsure of many of these dates, so they may be ±20 or 30 years). The number on the bottom is the score for overall similarity to the VMS marginalia. A perfect match on every letter would produce a score of 120. It is extremely difficult to find texts that score 77 or higher and only about 13% score 70 or higher.