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Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - Printable Version

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RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - oshfdk - 03-10-2024

(02-10-2024, 08:51 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Your examples of EVA-q with faint descender are quite interesting. Isn't that exactly what we see with p-like letters in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Latin script?

I'm not sure which of p-like letters you are referring to, there are a few of them on f116v. As far as I understand, some of them do have descenders, some don't have any detectable descenders at all. Overall, the transitions there do not look as sharp to me.

Quote:Is it possible that this is a bizarre consequence of the presumably imperfect way the VM scribe(s) cut their quills, which caused ink to flow differently depending on the type of stroke?

Well, they are truly the masters of imperfection those scribes  Smile

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - pfeaster - 04-10-2024

(03-10-2024, 05:57 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've found the same kind of sharp transition from the dark to light ink in EVA y on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (marked with a red arrow), so it's not limited to EVA q's. Could this be a retouch job?

I went looking for a definite example of a retouch job for comparison.  Here's one where the text was originally written in 1560 and was conspicuously touched up sometime thereafter by (apparently) the same notary after the page got rubbed and dirtied.

   

Here's another detail from a couple pages back in the same document that does not appear to have been retouched, but that shows a lot of variation in ink darkness, including a number of sharp "breaks" similar to the ones we've been considering in the VMs on [q] and other glyphs.  This variation encompasses most of each page for several pages, but not the several lines at the bottom of each page, so it might have something to do with the preparation or condition of the writing surface.

   

This is on paper rather than vellum, but after comparing a number of paper and vellum sources I don't get the sense that there's much difference in how the ink behaves, at least as far as this particular phenomenon goes.

My hope was that differences in ink darkness in the VMs could be used to gain insight into when a scribe paused during writing, since that could have implications for an encoding method.  For example, if the writer consistently wrote [chor] as [cho] (pause) [r], or [char] as [ch] (pause) [ar], that could potentially reveal something about the meaningful units or building-blocks of Voynichese.  There does seem to be some such patterning among light/dark contrasts.  But the more I look at other documents and read others' thoughts here, the less sure I am what to make of it.

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - hiki33 - 04-10-2024

(04-10-2024, 12:49 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My hope was that differences in ink darkness in the VMs could be used to gain insight into when a scribe paused during writing, since that could have implications for an encoding method.  For example, if the writer consistently wrote [chor] as [cho] (pause) [r], or [char] as [ch] (pause) [ar], that could potentially reveal something about the meaningful units or building-blocks of Voynichese.  There does seem to be some such patterning among light/dark contrasts.  But the more I look at other documents and read others' thoughts here, the less sure I am what to make of it.

I think finding out the stroke order of each voynich glyph would be more insightful. I wanted to make a post about that, but I'm not an expert.

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - Aga Tentakulus - 05-10-2024

If you're interested in ink colours and handwriting, this isn't bad. Many things are visible side by side.
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RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - Jorge_Stolfi - 09-08-2025

(04-10-2024, 12:49 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My hope was that differences in ink darkness in the VMs could be used to gain insight into when a scribe paused during writing, since that could have implications for an encoding method.

This is unlikely, because the "encoding" (whatever that meant) was almost certainly done on paper.  It would be stupid to compose a complicated text directly on vellum.  Therefore the Scribe almost certainly was not 'encoding" as he wrote but merely clean-copying from an already "encoded" draft.

Quote:For example, if the writer consistently wrote [chor] as [cho] (pause) [r], or [char] as [ch] (pause) [ar], that could potentially reveal something about the meaningful units or building-blocks of Voynichese.

But often the anomalously heavier strokes, that could be places where the Scribe went back and corrected or reinforced what he had already written, are often just part of a glyph.  So those interruptions do not seem to occur at semantically significant boundaries.  It is as if the text, for the Scribe, was just a bunch of strokes -- not even a bunch of glyphs...

All the best, --jorge

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - pfeaster - 10-08-2025

(09-08-2025, 10:18 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(04-10-2024, 12:49 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My hope was that differences in ink darkness in the VMs could be used to gain insight into when a scribe paused during writing, since that could have implications for an encoding method.
This is unlikely, because the "encoding" (whatever that meant) was almost certainly done on paper.  It would be stupid to compose a complicated text directly on vellum.  Therefore the Scribe almost certainly was not 'encoding" as he wrote but merely clean-copying from an already "encoded" draft.

I acknowledge and understand this argument -- but I don't necessarily agree with it.  Here's one line of counterargument for your consideration.  During your remarks on Voynich Manuscript Day, I believe you put forward the following hypotheses as secure enough to approach "consensus" territory (apologies if I'm mischaracterizing any of them):

(1) The scribe was *not* encoding in the sense of choosing / determining the sequence of graphemes (which were simply being copied).
(2) The scribe *was* responsible for inserting line breaks (to fit available space).
(3) If both #1 and #2 are correct, then any line-specific patterning must be epiphenomenal, and can't reflect anything meaningful about the encoding process -- because encoding would necessarily have taken place before the current division into lines, and in isolation from it.

But wouldn't it be just as reasonable to hypothesize that if line breaks were imposed at the time the text was being written onto the vellum we have today, then the encoding must have taken place at that same time, and not beforehand, to produce the patterns we now see?

Unless, I suppose, the scribe were adapting already-encoded text at the time of copying according to processes so transformative as to count as an additional encoding step.  For example, building on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the scribe would minimally need to be responsible for the alternation between gallows-glyph types.  And also the choice of [m] and [g] at line end.  And also every distinction laid out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (alternation of [o] and [qo], [o] and [a], [k] and [t], etc.).  That's a lot!  If we remove all these distinctions from a hypothetical rough draft on paper with line breaks in different places, there wouldn't be much left of Voynichese.  Indeed, it seems to me that a hypothetical paper draft might as well have been written conventionally in Latin or German or Italian at that point.

(09-08-2025, 10:18 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:For example, if the writer consistently wrote [chor] as [cho] (pause) [r], or [char] as [ch] (pause) [ar], that could potentially reveal something about the meaningful units or building-blocks of Voynichese.
But often the anomalously heavier strokes, that could be places where the Scribe went back and corrected or reinforced what he had already written, are often just part of a glyph.  So those interruptions do not seem to occur at semantically significant boundaries.  It is as if the text, for the Scribe, was just a bunch of strokes -- not even a bunch of glyphs...

I'm not sure we have enough knowledge of what counts as a "semantically significant boundary" (or of a grapheme, for that matter) to judge this.

But I also think my initial thoughts were pretty naive from the standpoint of mechanics of ink and penstrokes, so I'm not sure there's as much to be gained from this line of inquiry as I'd hoped.

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - ReneZ - 11-08-2025

This is a very interesting line of thought, and I have a feeling that it may be relevant for a proper understanding of the text. However, it is extremely complicated (or rather: convoluted) due to the many unknowns at different levels. 
This is especially true if one can 'switch off' all preferences for one idea or the other.

The infamous "Line As A Functional Unit" is mainly based on observations about properties of the text at starts and ends of lines. I think that Currier took a rather big step there. Such properties may have been the consequence of quite simple rules, without giving a specific role to the line as a whole.
However, they could still be better described in order to judge that properly.
I think that this goes to the heart of the question how much freedom the scribes may have had.

Not to mention that nowadays I guess we should more be speaking of the "Paragraph As An Island Unit".

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - Jorge_Stolfi - 11-08-2025

OK, let me state the premises and claims again:

Assumption: 
  • The VMS is not a hoax.  It has meaningful contents and the Author wished that the information was accurately represented in it.

Claims (under that assumption):
  1. The Scribe (the person who actually wrote on the vellum) was not the Author (the person who invented the script, chose the contents, composed the text, conceived the essential parts of the figures).
  2. While writing, the Scribe had freedom to chose line breaks inside paragraphs, placement of paragraphs, placement of margins, etc. without regard for their semantic contents,  He also had the freedom to do some substitutions, such as use p/f instead of other letters in order to highlight the head line of each parag.  He also had some abbreviations that he could choose to use in order to avoid bad line breaks. He may have had a way to hyphenate words.
  3. On the other hand, the Scribe did not have to do any thinking that was more complicated than what any scribe-for-hire would do -- such as estimate whether the next few words would fit in the current line, and decide whether to break a line and/or adjust the spacing of words accordingly.

These claims are supported by common sense and observable details in the manuscript:
  • It would not be sensible to compose the text or do some complicated encryption algorithm while writing directly on vellum.  Errors would be unavoidable; they would be rather laborious to correct, and would leave messy traces.  Imagine realizing that a Choty should have been ChoCThy several lines after the fact.  Thus it is very likely that composition and eventual encryption were done on paper.
  • The text in Herbal and Biological was obviously written after the figures were drawn, and the lines have different word counts because of the variable width of the plant.  On page 112r, after writing the first line the Scribe found that a broad area of the vellum adjacent to the East edge of the panel had some problem that interfered with the writing, and thus pulled the right rail of the text Westwards by a further 15 to 30 mm.   On the opposite page f112v, presumably for the same reason, he split the left rail into three (somewhat slanted) sections, at ~50, ~40, and ~30 mm from the West edge of the panel.   Because of these and other unexpected circumstances, it would be impossible for the Author to predict how many words would fit on each line, and thus where the line breaks would be.  Even for the Scribe it would be hard to predict the next line break in advance, before he got near the end of that line.
  • For the above reasons, it is unlikely that the encryption (if there was any) would have depended on line breaks.
  • But if the Scribe's work was limited to copying from the draft and other simple calligraphic decisions, then it would be a slow and tiresome but almost mechanical task.  Thus is likely that the Author would have rather paid a Starving Student or monk to do the job, rather than do it himself.
  • Anyway, if there were indeed N > 1 distinct Scribes, at least N-1 of them would be different from the Author.
  • Moreover, the letters of the VMS are very small and had to be drawn with a fine pen, by someone with a firm hand and nice handwriting. Not everybody who could write would have those qualifications.  Professional scribes and secretaries would.
  • There are places in the VMS where the Scribe made obvious mistakes (like skipping stars in the Zodiac or Stars sections, or writing the two halves of a parag, separated by a plant stem, mis-aligned by one line) which would be natural for a Scribe who did not understand the "code", language, and contents, but seem unlikely for the Author himself. 
  • If some or all of the Scribes were different from the Author, each would have to be trained to copy the script from the draft.  It would be already a minor hassle to teach him the alphabet and have him practice copying it until the result was satisfactory.  It would be a bigger hassle if the Author had to teach him also some complicated encryption method.  That makes it less likely that the Author would choose an encryption method that would require that step.  Generally speaking, methods that depended on line breaks would not have any advantage over methods did not.

Quote:The scribe would minimally need to be responsible for the alternation between gallows-glyph types.  And also the choice of [m] and [g] at line end.  And also every distinction laid out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (alternation of [o] and [qo], [o] and [a], [k] and [t], etc.).  That's a lot!

Yes, but those are the kind of decisions that a Scribe would be used to make when writing in Latin or some other common language.  

Even today, calligraphers and word processors are taught to avoid line breaks in certain bad positions.  Here are some rules for English that I found with some quick googling:
  • The articles (a, an, the) are never followed by a line break.
  • An adjective should stay together with what it is describing, but two or more adjectives can sometimes be separated with commas, and then it is possible (though not preferable) to break a line after one of the commas.
  • Clauses should stay together (never break lines after relative pronouns like which, that, who, etc.).
  • Prepositions are not followed by a line break if the break would separate them from the noun they refer to. A preposition in a concrete/physical meaning (e.g. "The book is in the drawer") always precedes a noun, and cannot be followed by a line break. However, in English, a preposition that is part of a phrasal verb (put up, figure out, take in) may sometimes not be followed by a noun ("I figured it out yesterday"), and so, it can be followed by a line break.
  • Proper names should stay together if at all possible (think of them as a single word with many parts).
  • "Do not carry over parts of abbreviations, dates, or numbers to the next line"
  • "Do not break numbers at a decimal point, or separate them from their abbreviated units, as with 15 kg or 300 BC. 
  • A widow is a very short line at the end of a paragraph.  Widows should be avoided because they look ugly and reduce readability.

Even if the VMS scribe could not understand the text, he may have been taught some simple rules like those, e.g. "never break between a qo and the next word" or "you can abbreviate iin as m if you need to" or "if you must break line in the middle of a long word, break preferably before a gallows and precede it with a single y to indicate that it is a continuation".  Rules like these could explain the anomalous statistics around line breaks.

And then the draft may have had four different kinds of spaces, namely inter-glyph spaces and short, medium, and long inter-word spaces.  The latter three could separate parts of compound words (as in "teapot"), separate full words, and separate sentences.  (Voynichologists seem to have agreed that there is only one kind of word space, but AFAIK this decision has never been explicitly questioned or justified.   Transcribers use "." for any space of any width that is clearly wider than inter-glyph, and use "," to mean "dubious word space" rather than "short word space".) In that case, the Scribe could then have been taught to break preferably at sentence-spaces and avoid breaking at compound-spaces.  

This sort of rule  too could have influenced the statistics around line breaks.  For instance, in English there should be an increased frequency of "The" in start-of-sentence, and of "-ed" in end-of-sentence.  And recently I found out that in the Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Ge'ez) it is common to start each sentence of a narrative with "And ..." (which must be why this "mistake" is common in the KJ Bible.)

All the best, --jorge

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - pfeaster - 12-08-2025

(11-08-2025, 03:29 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  • It would not be sensible to compose the text or do some complicated encryption algorithm while writing directly on vellum.  Errors would be unavoidable; they would be rather laborious to correct, and would leave messy traces.  Imagine realizing that a Choty should have been ChoCThy several lines after the fact.  Thus it is very likely that composition and eventual encryption were done on paper.

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.

(11-08-2025, 03:29 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  • The text in Herbal and Biological was obviously written after the figures were drawn, and the lines have different word counts because of the variable width of the plant....  Because of these and other unexpected circumstances, it would be impossible for the Author to predict how many words would fit on each line, and thus where the line breaks would be.  Even for the Scribe it would be hard to predict the next line break in advance, before he got near the end of that line.

Agreed that there's decent evidence that line breaks were introduced during physical inscription on vellum (and hence by the Scribe, if we're distinguishing roles).

(11-08-2025, 03:29 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  • For the above reasons, it is unlikely that the encryption (if there was any) would have depended on line breaks.

I could imagine the "vellum-specificity" of the line breaks being used to support either of two contradictory conclusions:

1) Line patterns can't have been copied from a rough draft, so the relevant features of the script can't have played any significant role in encoding meaning -- in fact, they can't even have been an incidental byproduct of an encoding scheme.

2) Line patterns permeate the whole text so thoroughly that they can only have arisen, somehow, during the encoding process itself, and hence the encoding must have taken place simultaneously with the actual inscription on vellum.

For now, I'm going to skip over a few arguments I believe hinge on claims that the text of the Voynich Manuscript was too proficiently executed to be the work of anyone but trained professionals with stable, thoroughly developed Voynichese hands -- except to suggest that this is debatable.  Moving on:  

(11-08-2025, 03:29 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  • There are places in the VMS where the Scribe made obvious mistakes (like skipping stars in the Zodiac or Stars sections, or writing the two halves of a parag, separated by a plant stem, mis-aligned by one line) which would be natural for a Scribe who did not understand the "code", language, and contents, but seem unlikely for the Author himself. 

This is 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.  It would have to be something the Scribe got wrong even though they presumably knew better.  And if that's true in the one case, why not in the others?  I don't have an alternative explanation for this apparent sloppiness, but I don't think the Scribe's inability to understand the "code" could fully account for it.

(11-08-2025, 03:29 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:The scribe would minimally need to be responsible for the alternation between gallows-glyph types.  And also the choice of [m] and [g] at line end.  And also every distinction laid out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (alternation of [o] and [qo], [o] and [a], [k] and [t], etc.).  That's a lot!

Yes, but those 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?

RE: Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing - Jorge_Stolfi - 13-08-2025

(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.

   

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:

   

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.