The Voynich Ninja

(11-12-2025, 08:41 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is the bottom line daiin from your last image with attached mm rulers from MSI scans. Do I understand it correctly, that you suggest that the dark parts of the ascender of n are added separately by a retracer as at least 3 different strokes?

Are you saying that, in your view, the Scribe wrote that plume with seven separate strokes?  Or that, after writing it with one faint stroke, he went back and retouched it with three separate strokes, precisely over the original one?

And that no human could have written this line of dots on f116v, so perfectly aligned?
[attachment=12908]

Seriously, I bet you will say that a single pen stroke may have faint and dark parts because of vellum irregularities and other accidents.  And yes, that can happen, both to the original traces and to the Retracer's.  And that possibility makes assignment of ink traces to retouching passes difficult and uncertain.

As in all other questions about the VMS, in this issue there are no certainties, only probabilities -- which are inevitably personal.  As I wrote before, all my claims of "this part is original", "this part is Rt1", etc are implicitly prefixed with "I think", "my best guess is", etc..  In some cases I am quite certain, in others what I claim is only what I think is the most likely among several possible explanations.

I do believe that the plume above was retraced.  Not with 100% probability, but significantly more than for "original".  Was it retraced with three strokes, or with a single faltering stroke?  At this time I think both are equally likely...  

If only we had 3000 dpi scans of just a few centimeter-size patches of text...

All the best, --stolfi

PS.  By the way, the black dots in the middle darker part of that plume are almost surely due to optical interaction of the "red" translucent ink with "blue" grains of the vellum underneath.

(11-12-2025, 10:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Are you saying that, in your view, the Scribe wrote that plume with seven separate strokes?  Or that, after writing it with one faint stroke, he went back and retouched it with three separate strokes, precisely over the original one?

I think this was likely written in one stroke with no retouches. All variation in the ink shade is probably due to other factors.

(11-12-2025, 10:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And that no human could have written this line of dots on f116v, so perfectly aligned?

I don't understand this, perfectly aligned to what? These are just 4 dots. If the intention was to put them evenly spaced in a straight line, then the scribe missed by about 1/2 mm both in the position and in spacing.

(11-12-2025, 11:10 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.o put them evenly spaced in a straight line, then the scribe missed by about 1/2 mm both in the position and in spacing.

But the three "impossibly precise retraced strokes" that you objected to are neither evenly spaced nor in a straight line, either.  They are aligned on a curved line, with deviation smaller than the min stroke width.  Like those dots of f116v.

And note that the dots of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were not done by a professional scribe hired to restore a faded manuscript.  

• In the "consensus" view, the "Latin" letters of f116v were casually penned by some later owner who had a severe dyslexia problem. 
  
• In my own current view, they were penned by someone desperately trying to recover the Voynichese writing that was wiped off together with the big water spill.  Without knowing the Voynichese alphabet.  Maybe by the same five-thumbed guy who spilled the water and wiped it off...
  

The point is that it the Rt1 Retracer would not need "super-human" ability to retrace the Rt0 strokes with no visible double-tracing.  Look at the luxury illuminated manuscripts of the period: professional scribes could routinely put down pen and brush strokes with that precision.

Or look at the glyphs that you accept as being retraced by the original Scribe himself...

All the best, --stolfi

More psychedelic hallucinations about f8r:

[attachment=12910]

This clip spans the left end of lines 13-15 of page f8r. Like most everywhere, there are signs of at least three layers of retracing: the original traces (Rt0), the general restoration pass (Rt1), and scattered retouching (Rt2).
   
    This false-color image was created by combining three monochromatic images from the Lazarus 2010 project -- MB940IR_012, MB700IR_008, MB365UV_007 -- as the red, green, and blue channels, respectively, of an RGB image.  No processing was done other than scaling all samples in each channel affinely to the full range 0-1. 
   
    The broad light and dark horizontal bands are warps of the vellum, exposed by the oblique illumination.  The grainy blue-green texture in the background could be some substance or surface finish feature that absorbs 940 nm infrared but not 700 nm infrared or 365 nm ultraviolet.  But another explanation is that the direction of the light was different in the 940 nm image, in which case the blue grains are shadows of bumps and dimples in the vellum.
   
    (A) The wide-footed t is mostly original, but some bits of it, as well as the c and h on each foot, are Rt1.
   
    (J) This original y was restored as an a by Rt1, but fortunately the original tail is still visible.
   
    (Q) This glyph was retraced by Rt2, who presumably added the spurious dash below and to the right of it.  The central area is light red on this image, suggesting a possible Rt1 glyph underneath. (R ) The top of this d is Rt2, the bottom is Rt1. The top loop is filled with Rt1. (S) This o is Rt2 but some Rt1 is visible in the SW side of the hole. The bump at the top is probably an Rt1 or Rt2 addition. (T) Morphologically, this glyph should have been an y, in the common word ychey. The unusual vertical tail tricked Rt1 into "restoring" it as a rounded q, ligated to the next Ch, producing the invalid(?) word qHhey.  Then Rt2 further emphasized this wrong interpretation.

I think enough of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has been covered for me. Thank you for offering to pick a page and thank you for your effort explicating the images.

I'm not a paleographer or a visual artist. I do have professional visual artists in my family, so I'm somewhat familiar with what modern professional capability with inks, paints and sketching looks like, but otherwise these are my amateur conclusions.

1) In the examples you have shown from f8r I haven't seen a single one where I would call the retracing the most likely explanation.
2) There is only one example from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where I would call the retracing a possible explanation: the leg of the first large p glyph at the very start of the page. However, I think it's more likely the double line there is by the original scribe:
- this is a huge glyph at the start of a page, which naturally calls for some embellishment or fix up. There are examples of embellished gallows elsewhere in the manuscript.
- most other cases of obvious retracing in the manuscript are at the beginning of a line, which is consistent with starting a line with a drained quill and redoing the first word in new ink immediately afterwards. The same could have happened here, the scribe could have started with a somewhat fainter vertical line and then retraced it.


So, overall on a randomly selected page I see no evidence of MRT.

I think the main difference between my assessment and yours can be easily demonstrated with the image below.

This is from f1r, which is the first page in the present order, and certainly an important page judging by the colored embellished glyphs.

The image below is from the start of a line and shows what I believe to be the original scribe running out of ink and retracing a few glyphs (iin and at least some part of Sh). As you can see d is ok, then the original strokes get progressively more faint.

From my point of view what you see here is highly precise state of the art very careful retracing (this is an important page) performed by the same scribe and probably using the same quill in the same writing session as when the first underlying strokes were done. This is in practice as good as a retracing can get. It's unlikely any other hand (scribe) using a different quill would get a better result. It's absolutely improbable that another scribe would be able to get a better result consistently on 200+ pages. To me this is a ground truth, challenging it requires extraordinary evidence, no amount of ink density variation would do.

[attachment=12917]

[attachment=12920]

I would say that he also recut the spring.
But the ink is the same.
The brightness is due to the fact that he went over it twice, but not everywhere.

(12-12-2025, 01:44 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's absolutely improbable that another scribe would be able to get a better result consistently on 200+ pages. To me this is a ground truth, challenging it requires extraordinary evidence, no amount of ink density variation would do.

I see now the problem.  Or actually the two problems.

First, since you a prori absolutely refuse to believe that "perfect" retracing -- that completely covers the original trace -- is impossible, you will dismiss any evidence that I could present of that, and choose some other explanation, no matter how unlikely. You will say that the thousand examples like these below
[attachment=12926]
[attachment=12923]
where the simplest explanation is a perfect retracing, are due to finicky quill and ink whose color and weight can change abruptly mid-stroke. Over 200+ pages, without the Scribe doing anything to fix the problem.

But then of course you will never admit the MRT, since it does imply 200+ pages of mostly perfect retracing.  By a scribe or scribes who would have been recruited specifically to do that.

But it seems to be worse than that: you also a prori absolutely believe that all the text and outline ink in the VMS was put down by the original Scribe. Thus you will say that the hundreds of examples of double tracing, like the infamous daiin of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and these below
[attachment=12925]
and the black-ink anatomical details and the robot tentakulus tentacle on the Zodiac nymphs are all cases of the Scribe going back over his own work and sloppily retracing or adding details, himself.  Even when this supposed back-tracing creates weirdos by just adding new ink, not retracing, like these two examples:
[attachment=12924]

Well, I must challenge your assumption that perfect retracing is hard.  There are many cases where an isolated  glyph or two are in darker ink, amidst a sea of normal ink.  Like this
[attachment=12927]
Surely you can see thousands of similar and better examples.   Your theory is that those are all cases where the Scribe went back on his work and retraced those isolated glyphs, with reloaded pen.  Right?

But don't those cases prove that perfect retracing is in fact possible and easy?  Even for a scribe as sloppy as the original one?

All the best, --stolfi

(12-12-2025, 08:49 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Surely you can see thousands of similar and better examples.   Your theory is that those are all cases where the Scribe went back on his work and retraced those isolated glyphs, with reloaded pen.  Right?

No, I believe that overwhelmingly the different ink density has something to do with the ink itself. If the ink can abruptly change from very dark to faint mid stroke, it can obviously change between isolated glyphs. As a parallel, there are examples of similar effects You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (I think @MarcoP found them):

[attachment=12940]

Poorly made ink can behave erratically, there is nothing extraordinary about this and from my point of view no other explanation for this varying ink density is necessary.

To reiterate, I think the examples of retracing, be it by the original scribe or by later scribes, are very limited in the manuscript. If we focus on the text, then there might be a dozen examples of retracing overall, extrapolating from those identified so far. Which is, curiously, similar to the number of obvious corrections in the manuscript, which appear far and between too.