(10-01-2026, 04:44 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The document below took me some time to produce:
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I have been going through the whole Voynich manuscript with the aim of compiling a list of the words with the most distinctive spellings.
Thanks Mark for the work. However, many of those "distinctive spellings" seem to be two more or less common words run together by the Scribe.
For example, on page 014 (f6v),
koarysar is probably
koary.sar . The latter is fairly common; the former occurs only there, but the similar
toary is fairly common too.
On page 010 (f4v),
iiincheod was probably
ain.cheod. Both words that occur multiple times. My reading is that the Scribe wrote the
a slightly disconnected as two strokes
ei (a glitch that he seems to have made dozens of times), and then the Retracer who restored the text turned that
e into an
i. You can see the original
e stroke, very faint, under the first
i.
Another source of "unusual spellings" may be the prefixes
o and
y that are sometimes attached to the word, sometimes separated by a space of variable width. Sometimes the latter is encoded as ',' in the transcription files, sometimes as '.', and sometimes ignored...
On page 021 (f10r), the word must have been
ro.
tCho.
Shor or
ro.tChy.Shor. All three words occur at least a few times. The first strange glyphs was originally a normal
r (you can see bits of the faint original ink) but was mangled into that weirdo by a Retracer.
Encrypted documents were usually written with great care, because even trivial errors, like replacing one glyph by a similar one, or skipping a glyph, would normally cause a non-trivial change in the decoded text. Thus when one assumes that the VMS is encrypted one will necessarily assume that there are practically no errors.
But there are several arguments for the thesis that it is
not encrypted. Then it most likely was transcribed from the Author's draft by a Scribe who knew the alphabet but could not read the text, who made many errors, which were not corrected because the Author could still read through them.
Here is an example of the kind of errors that such an "ignorant scribe" would make:
[
attachment=13375]
The correct text should be
- Explicit dyalog9[=us] Bonavẽ[=en]turæ / inter animã[=am] et rationem
- Here ends the dialogue of Bonaventura / between soul and reason
But the Red Scribe, who applied all the markings in red ink throughout the book, obviously did not know Latin, not even enough to tell that "Bonaventuræ" was a proper noun, that the "æ" was not "e", and that "raaonem" was not a Latin word. And he misspelled the "Bona" as "Bone". Thus the Proof Reader had to fix those errors (the brown ink).
But the VMS apparently did not go through a Proof Reader...
And then you have the errors added by the Retracers who, not knowing the alphabet, often mangled the original faint glyphs as they retraced them. Like that last example above. (And this retracing is not just a fringe theory; you should take it as a fact, even if some desperately refuse to admit it...)
All the best, --stolfi
