The Voynich Ninja

I'd rather suppose that he's correcting it to "eo", because what's in reddish ink above resembles "eo".

(05-10-2020, 08:58 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[large illustration deleted to save space]
And sometimes there are no typos.
Spelling variations are not only time dependent, but also location dependent.
Song of the Nibelungs.
Therefore, page 66. "and the mus des"
It comes from the Bavarian and fits exactly into the world of the battlements.
The German text has no mistakes, only a limited writing style in terms of time.

Aga, I am not sure that I would call those spelling variations. If you write a word with hump-r or regular r, it's not a spelling variation, it's simply a variation in the shape of the letter.

Similarly, if you write a word with long-ess, a snake-shaped ess, or a B-shaped ess, it is still the letter "s". The spelling didn't change, only the shape of the letter.

The example you circled with rotated-m (it looks like "z" and it usually stands for "m", "n", or "em" and their homonyms) could be considered a spelling variation, since it is an abbreviation symbol.


The examples that you pointed out in the illustration are very common variations. I see them every day in German manuscripts and there is never a problem with reading them. The variations in the VMS on 116v, 17r, and 66 are not common variations.

The context to the letter, is always the same.
The meaning is always an "s". There is no variant for n,m, etc. The text is very clear.

When you see the first one, it looks like it might be a mistake or correction. Then there's another one just like it.

[attachment=5533]

VMS f107v

I wonder if this "tiny c" is like the ones that are sometimes attached to the bottom of gallows chars.

There are several misshapen letters in these few lines, look at the horriblr con/9 that looks like a cj, I think it is a good example for the fact, that the scribe does not correct 'failed' letters

I have come to believe that the VMS text contains a rather large number of errors.  Maybe as many as 20% of the words have at least one "spelling error".  Meaning that the word that we have in the transcription is not the word that was meant to be there.

A fraction of those errors were made by the transcribers, like swapping r for s or omitting the ligature on a ch. But I suspect that the Scribe himself often made such mistakes.  Probably because he found it difficult to read the Author's handwriting on the draft.

Besides the above pairs that transcribers have trouble with, he may have confused other glyphs or glyph combinations that are close in "ink distance".   I have pointed out before that, in sloppy handwriting  the ending in can be confused with an r.   But also a short k can be confused with a d:

[attachment=14859][attachment=14860]

One more confounding possibility to keep in mind...

All the best, --stolfi

(25-03-2026, 08:40 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have come to believe that the VMS text contains a rather large number of errors.  Maybe as many as 20% of the words have at least one "spelling error".  Meaning that the word that we have in the transcription is not the word that was meant to be there.

A fraction of those errors were made by the transcribers, like swapping r for s or omitting the ligature on a ch. But I suspect that the Scribe himself often made such mistakes.  Probably because he found it difficult to read the Author's handwriting on the draft.

That's a significant claim — 20% error rate would affect virtually every analysis of the text. Could you point to specific instances where you identify an error, or describe the criteria you use to distinguish a "spelling error" from a legitimate word form?

Scribe 1 definitely makes more of what appear to be "mistakes" than the other scribes, which is kind of ironic since Scribe 1's hand is in many ways the most "legible."

(26-03-2026, 02:21 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Scribe 1 definitely makes more of what appear to be "mistakes" than the other scribes, which is kind of ironic since Scribe 1's hand is in many ways the most "legible."

Could we have examples of what you call a "mistake"? Without a way to independently identify which words are mistakes and which are correct, the claim is unfalsifiable: any word that doesn't fit a proposed pattern can be reclassified as a scribal mistake.

That's why I put "mistake" in quotes - no way to know what was intended until we can read it. There are lots of examples in Scribe 1's work where they write a glyph that is unique or unusual but that MIGHT have been intended to be something more typical. Examples can be found on 7r line 1 [looks like qko], 18r line 1 [looks like cf], the 3-shaped character on 10r, at the beginning of the last and second-to-last line, and more.