The Voynich Ninja

Are there good clues as to what direction and order the strokes of each Voynichese character was drawn?


I'm a word and language nerd who has studied Chinese and Japanese as second languages, including the closely related writing systems for both. The key to mastering Chinese characters is mastering, and adhering to, the rules about how strokes are drawn. These rules were formulated over centuries of the brush and paper becoming the preferred writing media in China, and ensure that the result is as legible and aesthetically pleasing as possible. In short, for those curious:
[*]Every character is a uniform sized square, no matter how many strokes
[*]General progress in writing a character is from the upper left corner of the square to the bottom right
[*]Ticks and tails can go off in any direction, but straight lines should only ever be drawn left to right and/or top to bottom
[*]Begin an enclosure, draw the interior, then close the enclosure




As with really any writing system, reading cursive Chinese characters is really a matter of recognizing the order in which the strokes were drawn. Draw them differently, and the character will likely be hard to read.

I've never learned to do calligraphy in any script or language, and I'm certainly not as versed in it as many of you here who have looked at a lot of old manuscripts. But it's on my list of things to learn when I retire, and it's an art I've always had an appreciation for. The argument was made in the basic character decomposition thread that the scribes of the VMS were likely used to writing cursive, not book hand, and the VMS character set looks cursive-ish. This should be helpful, then, for looking for the stroke qualities typical of the pen's starting point, ending point, and general direction.

Which brings me to my next question: Do we have any good idea what kind of writing utensil the scribe used, and how it was likely wielded? This should be an easy question for our paleography gurus here. I only bring this up because the writing utensil and medium of choice had a major effect on the development of most scripts. The Chinese script, as I mentioned, was shaped by the a revulsion to pushing a paintbrush against its bristles, by a hand that never made contact with the paper during the writing process. The Thai script was designed to be easy to scratch on palm leaves. If the VMS represents a lost script of perhaps a lost language, it is possible that it was a script originally designed to be written with a different type of utensil on a different type of medium. This could explain why it is left-leaning and not full of strong vertical lines. Also if the traditional writing medium was not durable, and the users of this script had no custom of putting writing on anything durable (or even making anything durable at all) due, that might explain why only one item has been found that uses it.

Quote:RenegadeHealer: ...
Do we have any good idea what kind of writing utensil the scribe used, and how it was likely wielded?...

Yes, we do. It's still possible to make medieval quills and medieval styluses in the same way as in the Middle Ages. The quills were cut with a knife, which is pretty much how we do it now.

You can still buy parchment prepared in the same way. I've used a quill pen on parchment. It's more ink-resistant than paper (it takes more practice and you have to be even more careful to not brush against it and smear the ink as it takes longer to dry), but the process of laying down the strokes (in terms of stroke order) is essentially the same as writing with a quill on paper.


A quill pen has to be held and used in a certain direction in order to create the thick and thin strokes (this is partly based on the cut of the quill and partly based on the angle). This is true for all calligraphy, and the style will partly depend on the cut and breadth of the quill.

The VMS scribes weren't very good at this. If you look at medieval bookhands, you can see the scribe was very aware of which direction created the thicks and thins. The VMS is less this way. It doesn't look like the work of a professional scribe (it's more like the handwriting of students who copied their own textbooks).


A quill also has to be pulled in a certain direction or the tines will split too far apart, or the pressure is on the wrong direction related to the flow of ink.

The direction of the strokes in any form of calligraphy is optimized to avoid drawing against the direction of the quill. To not do so produces splots and stutters and if the scribe really forces the pen, can actually spray the ink over the work area. Start up and work down, start left and work right (if you are right-handed) and you won't be pushing the nib in the wrong direction.

A really good scribe will also modify the pressure on the pen as the ink is fresh to when the ink is starting to run out. You need a lighter hand to deal with a full quill and you can put more pressure as the ink runs out and needs to be re-dipped. This way the dark-to-light pattern that occurs as the ink level changes is a little less apparent.


Using a fountain pen is much easier than a quill, the ink doesn't run out (as quickly) and there is a more measured load of ink on the nib, and you don't have to trim the metal every few pages as with a quill. But if it is a broad pen (a calligraphy nib), many people have trouble using a fountain pen.

They did have metal styluses in those days, but when I read up on it, I got the impression that most scribes used quills in the early 15th century. It depended partly on where you lived, your socio-economic class, and whether you were a professional scribe or amateur writer.

Thank you for a very thorough reply, -JKP-. It seems like the basic principles of writing with a quill pen are not all that different from writing with a brush, and would favor similar stroke orders for similar reasons.

I'm seeing more and more suggestions of features of the VMS that are more consistent with an amateur or student's notebook than a professionally published book.