The Voynich Ninja

I simply cannot imagine that Currier would be talking about words, when he says ' little groups of letters'.
Eva-am could be one such little group, but he uses the plural, so we need others too. And again, this little group really occurs elsewhere too.

It looks like a line-final version of -ar, but that doesn't really fit completely. (Nothing ever does ).

In any case, these occurrences only constitute a minor percentage of all lines.

(02-03-2020, 12:54 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I simply cannot imagine that Currier would be talking about words, when he says ' little groups of letters'.
Eva-am could be one such little group, but he uses the plural, so we need others too. And again, this little group really occurs elsewhere too.

It looks like a line-final version of -ar, but that doesn't really fit completely. (Nothing ever does ).

In any case, these occurrences only constitute a minor percentage of all lines.

Alphabetic scripts use groups of letters to transport meaning. But even for them it is possible that on semantic level a group of letters represent only a part of a word (if hyphenation is used) or represents two or more words.

Moreover, the term 'groups of letters' is not the only instance Currier is referencing to groups of letters or symbols. In appendix A from 1976 Currier also writes about "symbol groups 'chol' and 'chor'" and about: "Symbol groups at the ends of lines are frequently of a character unlike those appearing in the body of the text sometimes having the appearance of fillers" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Anyway, the observation of Currier that the line appears to be a functional unit was further analyzed in 2012 by Elmar Vogt. In his statistical analysis Vogt comes to the conclusion: "1. The first word of a line is longer than average, 2. The second word is shorter than average, and 3. Over the course of the line, the average word length drops" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 4).

We have evidence that the scribe was choosing little groups of letters to fill out the line to the margin. Or to say it with Nick Pelling words: the "text goes right up to the line-ends, often deteriorating in the last few characters, in much the way that I'd expect nulls to (Currier noted as much)" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This can only mean that the text as well as the text layout and even damages to the vellum were copied or that the text was generated during writing.

But even if you can't accept Curriers observation as evidence I would still argue that speculations "that the MS has been copied from a draft" and that "the copyist did not understand what he was copying" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) are far from helpful. It is far too simple to explain every curious detail as copying error. This way it is literally possible to explain everything.

(02-03-2020, 11:37 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We have evidence that the scribe was choosing little groups of letters to fill out the line to the margin.

I haven't seen this evidence and I would like to see it.

(02-03-2020, 11:37 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.speculations "that the MS has been copied from a draft" and that "the copyist did not understand what he was copying" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) are far from helpful. It is far too simple to explain every curious detail as copying error.

The part "It is far too simple..." does not follow from what was written before that.
I do not believe that every curious detail is a copying error and I never said so.

(02-03-2020, 11:37 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We have evidence that the scribe was choosing little groups of letters to fill out the line to the margin. Or to say it with Nick Pelling words: the "text goes right up to the line-ends, often deteriorating in the last few characters, in much the way that I'd expect nulls to (Currier noted as much)" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This can only mean that the text as well as the text layout and even damages to the vellum were copied or that the text was generated during writing.

Apparently it is not well known that some scribes mostly used abbreviations at the end of lines. There are cases (such as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 1460 ca) in which some symbols appear at the end of lines more than 80% of the times - ballpark figure, but browse a few pages looking for 3-like (-m) and 9-like (-us) glyphs.

While maybe we can say that the scribe of the Vatican ms "was choosing little groups of letters to fill out the line to the margin", I don't know if I would define these abbreviations as fillers: they clearly have the function of contracting the last word of the line to make it fit. The whole Latin text can then be seen as a filler, since it does fill the manuscript?

I think we can safely exclude that the scribe of Vat.Lat.410 was copying "the text as well as the text layout and even damages" (though he was certainly copying the text).
Saying that "the text was generated during writing" is closer to the mark, but possibly too strong, unless we only mean that the scribe was free to choose when and how a word was to be abbreviated. Vat.Lat.410 is the Latin translation of an older Greek text and the manuscript is a luxury copy (made for Pope Pius II, Enea Silvio Piccolomini) of the pre-existing Latin translation, see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. I think that the one who generated the text was the author of the Latin translation (Pietro Balbi) rather than the scribe.

PS: attached details from 19v and 35r

(03-03-2020, 06:30 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(02-03-2020, 11:37 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We have evidence that the scribe was choosing little groups of letters to fill out the line to the margin.

I haven't seen this evidence and I would like to see it.

The layout of the text corresponds to the folio. This is evidence enough. 

As described by Currier the lines of the VMs work as functional entity: "the line is a functional entity in the manuscript on all those pages where the text is presented linearly" (Currier 1972). Currier observation was confirmed by the statistical work of Elmar Vogt (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). At the same time the end of the lines nearly always fit into the available space. This means the layout of the text corresponds to the layout of the folio. This was only possible since the author of the VMs was knowing every hole in the vellum as well as well as the illustrations. But how was the text generated by its author?

Curriers answer to this question is that the layout of the text was made during writing and that the scribe added fill words if necessary (see Currier 1972).

Your answer to this question is: "Rather than considering a virtual right margin in the final manuscript, I would prefer to consider a true margin in a source document, for example a draft" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 

Your answer implies that the layout of the text was copied. This would mean that the layout fits only so well since the source document had the same size, contained the same illustrations and the same mechanical damages as the VMs or at least markers for them. In addition, any copying error such as a doubled or omitted 'word' would have resulted in longer or shorter lines. With other words, any copy error would have been immediately obvious. But the VMs doesn't even contain visible corrections. It is hard to believe that the VMs was copied without any errors especially since you assume that the copyist did not understand what he was copying (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But even if we assume that your answer is correct this would mean that the text we see today is a perfect copy of the source text and was this way intended by its author.

(04-03-2020, 01:11 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the VMs doesn't even contain visible corrections....

It does have corrections. Many of them. But they are minor, usually limited to parts of individual characters.

(04-03-2020, 02:34 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(04-03-2020, 01:11 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the VMs doesn't even contain visible corrections....

It does have corrections. Many of them. But they are minor, usually limited to parts of individual characters.

My formulation was indeed not precise enough. 

With corrections I mean changes that affected the layout of the text. If the text was copied I would expect that sometimes miscopied glyph groups were scratched out and replaced. But there are no scratched out places.

In the same way it is noteworthy that the last glyphs in a line are never squeezed into the available space. Even holes in the velum didn't mean that the scribe was running out of space.

(03-03-2020, 09:33 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Apparently it is not well known that some scribes mostly used abbreviations at the end of lines. 

Some form of abbreviation also mean that the layout of the text was generated during writing. This also would imply that Currier was right and that the scribe had generated at least the end of the lines. René on the other hand argues that not only the text but also the layout of the document was copied from a source document and that "the copyist did not understand what he was copying" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

All three can be true at the same time - i.e. that the layout was largely preserved (as Rene suggests, as per my argument that we can see copies of layout gaps that were presumably in the preceding document), that the text is abbreviated (e.g. if the text had previously been expanded via an intermediate verbose cipher stage), and also that the scribe was copying blindly (e.g. that the text was transformed in place on a wax tablet, and copied from there onto the page).

These are not entirely new observations. ;-)

(04-03-2020, 11:16 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "the copyist did not understand what he was copying"

I consider this as one possibility among others.
There is no clear evidence that this has actually happened.

Using Schroedinger's cat as analogy, the box has not yet been opened and all possibilities co-exist. There are more than just two possibilities as well.