(02-12-2025, 06:15 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (01-12-2025, 10:54 PM)qoltedy Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are other additions or exceptions you could add onto the theory of multiple scribes (it's copying from an earlier text, it's a phonetic transcription, it's oral knowledge passed down) but each of these requires its own leaps in logic and speculative assumptions. If the text had multiple scribes to copy a previous text, who wrote THAT text? Was it one person? Meaning one person wrote the entirety of a Proto-Voynich Manuscript, and then later paid 5 scribes to write it again? For what purpose would someone do it this way, instead of just writing it themselves?
It would be insane to write anything on vellum straight from one's head. It would be like writing a document today with the keyboard connected directly to the laser printer.
Vellum was expensive and difficult to erase from. Moreover that task required an experienced hand capable of writing tiny letters neatly; something that not everyone would have.
Thus I bet that practically every manuscript on vellum, including the VMS, including encrypted letters, was written on (much cheaper) paper first, with all the correcting and crossinging-out that may have been necessary. And only then this paper draft would be copied to vellum.
And this last step was a boring mechanical task that required good "quill driving" skill but no understanding of the text. Thus it must have been usually delegated to a secretary or more-or-less professional scribe, or to "scribal shop" (like a monastery).
Then the VMS Author would be the person who wrote the draft, not the person(s) who put quill to vellum. Most likely, he was only one person for the whole book.
The Author would have to teach the Voynichese alphabet to each scribe, and have the scribe practice until he could copy it satisfactorily well. This point argues against multiple scribes working at the same time. But it would allow for a different scribe for each section (counting Herbal-A and Herbal-B as two sections), if they were composed by the Author in separate epochs, separated by substantial time intervals.
All the best, --stolfi
While agree that it was likely standard at the time to do such practices of writing on paper and transferring to vellum later, we simply can't use that assumption as any definitive evidence for the actual construction of the VMS. Using that logic, many different practices were standard at the time, such as simple substitution ciphers. Just because something was standard practice at the time doesn't mean that's what the VMS authors and potential scribe(s) did.
In fact, given the sheer WEIRDNESS of the VMS, I would argue that the author seemed in ways to actively shun the conventions of the time. To me, the VMS appears to be made by someone with boundless creativity and originality. Doing something that went against the "standard way of doing things" may make it MORE likely that it was done that way, given the sheer uniqueness of everything else in the VMS.
It requires speculation to come up with a coherent narrative about the VMS creation, but that speculation must account for the various pieces of evidence. How does the hypothesis of multiple scribes account for the fact that we have numerous pieces of evidence to indicate the "scribes" also illustrated the drawings on the pages, often with the same pen in the same session?
Here is specifically what I find hard to believe:
-The Author created an extremely unique uncrackable encryption scheme or language which likely took much thought to even design/figure out.
-The Author wrote an entire Proto-VMS, for some reason to encode some meaningful information, using this scheme they designed. This included all the illustrations too(?)
-Then, The Author taught 1-5 additional people how to write in their system, enough that they could reasonably correct mistakes in the original Proto-VMS, know how to rearrange words or sentences that are crossed out. Either they taught them how to fully use the system, so they actually understood it (that seems like quite a lot of work), or they only taught the scribes enough to copy the original (how would the scribes know how to correct mistakes without understanding the underlying system?)
-Then, the scribe(s) copied the entire Proto-VMS, including illustrations, and drew them often in the same session with the same pen. (Why are the illustrations so seemingly crude if so much preparation went into even the drawings?)
To me, this feels like a rather elaborate explanation to explain 2 anomalous things about the VMS:
1.) Relative lack of "mistakes" we'd expect from off-the-cuff writing
2.) 2-5 distinct handwriting styles, correlated with specific topics
If these 2 things can be explained in a simpler way with the hypothesis of The Author being the only scribe/illustrator, writing in a custom personal script, directly on vellum, with no draft, over the course of years, I'm inclined to think that's an overall simpler explanation which requires less assumptions.