(26-12-2018, 07:30 PM)Beatrice Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So do you really think it is a piece of nonsense? If so, how would you explain the hammering-like pattern behind? 
Do you know the image that looks like Marilyn Monroe in the distance and Albert Einstein close-up? The overall impression of a clean, very readable script might suggest a humanist style, but the shapes of the glyphs mostly point the other way, to some gothic styles as JKP explained.
If by "hammering-like pattern" you mean well-separated glyphs i.e. not cursive, this is mostly true, although there are some ligature-like combinations that are hard to interpret. That's Voynichese for you, paradoxes everywhere.
I really don't want to state any opinion on whether the text in the MS does or does not show features of a humanistic hand, but I can provide some more background information.
As I wrote, this was proposed in 1995 by Sergio Toresella. There was a further explanatory comment about this from Jim Reeds, which I have not yet been able to find. I did not remember the comment in D'Imperio, quoting the paper by Krischer, who got feedback from Rodney Dennis (curator of manuscripts in Houghton Library of the Harvard College library). This was many years earlier.
The opinion of Toresella was highly regarded in the Voynich mailing list for many years, but there were also voices who criticised this, suggesting that the writing looked more like a Caroline script. This specific comment was from Barbera Barrett.
Much more recent opinions have been reported here in this forum.
The problem with all this is that it is almost impossible to judge the real expertise of the various people making the suggestions, and it is also not at all uncommon for people at the highest level of experience to disagree.
Finally, more generally about humanistic writing. This is a special case, since it is not some general evolution of handwriting, but it was a deliberate change introduced by a specific group of people. It therefore came about in a relatively short time frame. One can see how the earliest proponents were still influenced by the Gothic script, and they were also still happy to use the common abbreviations for pro- , -rum , - us etc.
A few decades later, the humanistic handwriting looks different, does not seem to use abbreviations anymore, and became the example for typesetters' fonts. It was used specifically for writings with humanistic contents, and not for writings related to medicine (among others).
On a side note, a number of the books that Voynich acquired from the Jesuits, together with the Voynich MS, are fine examples of humanistic handwriting. They trace back to various humanist libraries, such as those of Mathias Corvinus, king of Hungary, of Marc Antoine Muret and of Alphonse king of Aragon and Naples.
So how could we explain the use of Gothic abbreviations and ligatures in the Vms?
The humanist script only has the ligatures "ct", "et" and "st". But the humanist scribes could not use the Gothic abbreviations because these stood for Latin -us, -orum, -em, -am, -is and so on. For the sake of consistency, the vernacular languages needed no more Latin abbreviations.
So how can we make sense of the Voynichese abbreviations and ligatures if it were a humanist script?
I don't think the tails, macrons, and ligature shapes in the VMS main text were simply copied from a script that was unknown to the scribes.
They are drawn as though the scribes were used to writing them. Even the "9" symbol (con-, com-, -us, -um) is occasionally superscripted, which confirms that it is indeed the Latin "9" abbreviation shape and not the letter "g" (even if it does not carry the same meaning as Latin "9").
(31-12-2018, 05:53 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.![[Image: InventedAlphabets.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/InventedAlphabets.png)
Sorry, JKP, just a question. What specific glyphs appear to be invented? Thanks.
(31-12-2018, 09:46 PM)Beatrice Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry, JKP, just a question. What specific glyphs appear to be invented? Thanks.
Most of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin letters, numbers, ligatures, and abbreviations. However, with the exception of EVA-k (which is a common Latin abbreviation), the "gallows" characters do not follow common Latin glyph-shapes, nor are they common to other alphabets in any systematic way.
It's possible they are inventions based on the same general ideas as Greco-Roman scribal shapes, but they are not
specifically identifiable. That's why I say Voynichese might include some invented shapes.
(01-01-2019, 04:36 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (31-12-2018, 09:46 PM)Beatrice Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Sorry, JKP, just a question. What specific glyphs appear to be invented? Thanks.
Most of the VMS glyphs are based on Latin letters, numbers, ligatures, and abbreviations. However, with the exception of EVA-k (which is a common Latin abbreviation), the "gallows" characters do not follow common Latin glyph-shapes, nor are they common to other alphabets in any systematic way.
It's possible they are inventions based on the same general ideas as Greco-Roman scribal shapes, but they are not specifically identifiable. That's why I say Voynichese might include some invented shapes.
As far as I know, all of them appear in most mss. They may have different thickness, roundness or height but it seems to me the scribe invented nothing new, just wrote them differently. For example, your "f" can be different from mine, despite the fact that we both identify it as the same graph for the same fricative sound. So basically we would have here different personal variants of the same graph.
Quote:Beatrice: As far as I know, all of them appear in most mss. They may have different thickness, roundness or height but it seems to me the scribe invented nothing new, just wrote them differently.
Show me examples of
cTh,
[font=Eva]cKh, cFh[/font], and
f (with the loop on the top-right). I don't think these appear in "most manuscripts".
I've gone through more than 15,000 manuscripts in the last 11 years (along with more than 80 world alphabets) and I can't find them. I can find all the others, most are quite common. The benched glyphs might be based on the same general
ideas as Greco-Latin scribal conventions, but the
specific shapes I believe are invented.