(12-08-2025, 04:35 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In your account, it seems the Author would have gambled on himself being more likely to make mistakes while writing in Voynichese, in spite of being able to understand it, than a Scribe copying his proofread text afterwards without being able to understand it. That might be a reasonable gamble under some circumstances, but it doesn't strike me as an obvious one to make.
Indeed, according to my orgin theory, the Author must have made many mistakes when creating the draft; and he even had only an imperfect knowledge of its contents, since many technical words and even some grammatical constructs from the source texts would have been unknown to him. So he would have not been worried about the Scribe adding a few more errors.
But even without my origin theory, the contents of the VMS is almost certainly "technical", not something of critical military, diplomatic, or commercial importance. It probably had very few numbers, if any, and they probably would have been spelled out ("five" rather than "5"). If that is the case, the Author would not have been too worried about the Scribe making a few spelling mistakes.
Quote:(and hence by the Scribe, if we're distinguishing roles)
I think it is useful to distinguish the roles, considering the claims that there was more than one Scribe. Even if there was only one, and it was the same as the Author, the two words would refer to two consecutive stages in the creation of the manuscript.
Quote:[The misaligned lines on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are] admittedly a puzzler. To me, such evidence speaks against the Scribe being a trained professional. But I'm not sure how much we can conclude from it about the Scribe's ability to understand the "code." Would you agree that (in your account) the Scribe would minimally have needed to grasp the idea that text was to be copied from a source "rough draft" and written in linear fashion across the page with breaks inserted as necessary? If so, a misalignment would seem to be a mistake in execution that was not due to a failure of understanding.
Indeed it is puzzler to me too.
I believe that the Author copied the
illustrations of bits of plants in the Pharma section from some pharmacological book, and also copied the
text of the Herbal pages from another book; but could not copy the illustrations of the latter. At some later time, when he no longer had access to this second book, he set out to provide illustrations for the Herbal texts by copying some bits from the Pharma section and making up the rest of the corresponding plants.
I used to think that, apart from those Pharma bits, the plants were entirely made up by the
Scribe. But now, after think about that misalignment of f34r, I changed my mind. I now believe that Author's draft already had a rough sketch of of the whole plant and of the overall layout of the text relative to it. This in fact seems more plausible than my previous theory. The Scribe surely could flesh out simple details of the illustrations, like nymph hairdos and dresses; but inventing a whole plant on each page would have been asking too much of him.
Thus I now think that the draft of You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. that the Author gave to the Scribe was something like the image below. The red text of course would bein Voynichese, which the Scribe could copy but not understand. The black text with the note would be in some laanguage that the Scribe did understand.
[
attachment=11225]
Note the accidental mis-alignment between the left and half lines 4 to 9. The Author did not even notice it, since he knew how the text should be read. But the Scribe was confused. He was used to copying text that ran all across the page, jumping over plants. But he also knew that sometimes there was text in two columns, such as on f75r. So he wrongly guessed that it was the case here too. And so he produced something like this:
[
attachment=11226]
With 126 Herbal pages to check, the Author probably did not notice the mistake until it was too late, well after the Scribe was paid and gone. And anyway it would be hard to fix that mistake on the vellum.
Quote:Jorge_Stolfi Wrote:[alternation between gallows-glyph types, the choice of [m] and [g] at line end] are the kind of decisions that a Scribe would be used to make when writing in Latin or some other common language.
Only if the choices are in fact among functionally interchangeable equivalents. One problem here is that if we decide that any grapheme with a distinctive positional distribution must be "equivalent" to one or more other graphemes with complementary positional distributions, we'd risk being left with -- I don't know -- maybe two or three truly contrastive graphemes?
I am not arguing for that. The fact that the distribution of glyphs depends on the posiiton in the paragraph or line can have several possible causes, such as rules for "good" line breaking (like, say, "never break a line after
al,ar, or, dal, dol", "if you must break a line inside a word, do it brefore a gallows or a
d, and start the next line with an isolated
y to mark it as continuation".)
Puffs (gallows
p and
f) may or may not have have a hook at the end of the arm. But if a line starts with a puff, it is almost always a hooked one. That bias may simply be due to the Scribe being more likely to omit the hook when space is cramped.
