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+--- Thread: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? (/thread-4996.html)
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - Bluetoes101 - 29-10-2025
(28-10-2025, 10:04 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm sorry, but I don't really understand your answer in this context. Could you clarify that again?
If you were unsure/working out, new vellum would be a very strange choice. I'm not sure there's other examples of this.
If we are to take LFD "many scribes" work as correct, it's hard to see a group of people doing this rather than using a chalkboard and talking about the possible/correct interpretation or something along those lines.
So, those points make the idea possible but unlikely. The following, imo, takes it from unlikely to incorrect.
If the idea is that people were unsure about if a glyph was o, qo or y etc, we wouldn't see the positional variance (or lack of) with these glyphs.
You would expect to see words that end in qo and o with great frequency as they didn't know if it was o, y or qo, but we don't, they are mostly just y.
This is just one small example and the further this idea is expanded the clearer the issue will be.
There is, imo, repetition and almost-repetition (slight variants) that happen on a line, and also vertically but some examples are so vast that almost an entire page would need to be dedicated to one unsure line.
If we are to consider that, then also the same words repeat, so were they unsure then sure again then unsure again? Why are surrounding words entirely different?
Some examples can look like unsure variance, but if you took something like the below it becomes pretty difficult to attribute it to that even though I cherry picked an example with lots of almost-repetition
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - dashstofsk - 29-10-2025
(25-10-2025, 06:19 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it was too badly distorted by ignorant people when it was copied!
It seems to me unlikely that the manuscript is a copy of an older manuscript and that the copyist was someone who was unfamiliar with the alphabet, with the language and who did not know what the text meant. To have to do it for ~225 pages and ~36000 words and to do it in the full knowledge that no-one would ever be able to understand the text would really have been a thankless task. The copyist would have got bored, got impatient, made mistakes, made corrections, lost enthusiasm, and it would have shown in the writing.
But instead the writing has an effortless flow to it. The writer wrote whole paragraphs without having to pause or to think what should come next. It doesn't seem to show that the writer was having to lift the pen mid-word or between words in order to consult the older manuscript.
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 29-10-2025
(29-10-2025, 02:58 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
If you were unsure/working out, new vellum would be a very strange choice. I'm not sure there's other examples of this.
If we are to take LFD "many scribes" work as correct, it's hard to see a group of people doing this rather than using a chalkboard and talking about the possible/correct interpretation or something along those lines.
Thank you very much for taking the time to give me such a detailed answer. Now I understand what you mean and I cannot refute it.
Nevertheless, I have a different opinion.
Because what do we see today? Many people invest an enormous amount of work, time and, in some cases, money in carefully examining the Voynich Manuscript. Why should it have been any different back then?
Imagine that a wealthy person of that time purchased this book at great expense because he was convinced that it contained magical, mystical and, in any case, secret knowledge. But of course, they had great difficulty deciphering the writing because it was rather illegible, so they commissioned one or more scribes to copy the writing as accurately as possible in order to be able to decipher it better. They used parchment because they could afford it and because they were convinced that this mystery had to be recorded on parchment. Of course, this is only an unverifiable theory, but it would explain the problem with the vellum and the different writers (may be he had fired the first one...
) .(29-10-2025, 02:58 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The following, imo, takes it from unlikely to incorrect.
If the idea is that people were unsure about if a glyph was o, qo or y etc, we wouldn't see the positional variance (or lack of) with these glyphs.
You would expect to see words that end in qo and o with great frequency as they didn't know if it was o, y or qo, but we don't, they are mostly just y.
This is just one small example and the further this idea is expanded the clearer the issue will be.
I'm not sure if I've been understood correctly here.
There are certainly various reasons why many of the same words appear on a page. This has already been discussed at length. But that's not what I'm talking about (I'll write another post about that later).
There are two different things that I suspect are related to the poor quality of the underlying text.
1. Parts are difficult to decipher. Perhaps they are blurred, corroded or mouldy. This can be seen in sequences where words (or in most cases even several words) that are very similar are written with different glyphs that have the same ascenders or descenders. This pattern also makes them easy to recognise. I believe I have sufficiently explained this here and it is not a matter of every o y q being unreadable.
2. On the other hand, there are also many identical words in the text. But that is a different problem.
Several possibilities are immediately obvious to me:
a. Take a look at medical recipe books from this period; only a very limited vocabulary is used to describe the processes.
Frequent words are honey, oil, wine, dissolve, vinegar, dry, cook, etc. So you should find many words that are repeated on such pages.
b. The direct repetition of the same words in succession can have two possible explanations.
i. I suspect that these words were different in the original manuscript, but the copyists did not notice this difference or they standardised it. This is something that is still done today, see Eva transcriptions (this is not a criticism! I understand the necessity of this). I will soon publish an article here that describes this very problem and at least substantiates it as a possible thesis.
ii. Word repetitions can also be seen as reinforcement: Cook, cook and cook it. To make it clear that it should be cooked for a very long time.
iii. Repetitions of identical words are also normal in languages:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
‘It remains true for all that that that that that that that refers to is not the same that that that that refers to.’
out of voynich 15v.2: orororo Raiin/ or Ligatur = ore; oro; ro Ligatur = ratio; Raiin= regat / ore oro; ratio regat (joke).
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 29-10-2025
(29-10-2025, 03:54 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It seems to me unlikely that the manuscript is a copy of an older manuscript and that the copyist was someone who was unfamiliar with the alphabet, with the language and who did not know what the text meant. To have to do it for ~225 pages and ~36000 words and to do it in the full knowledge that no-one would ever be able to understand the text would really have been a thankless task. The copyist would have got bored, got impatient, made mistakes, made corrections, lost enthusiasm, and it would have shown in the writing.
But instead the writing has an effortless flow to it. The writer wrote whole paragraphs without having to pause or to think what should come next. It doesn't seem to show that the writer was having to lift the pen mid-word or between words in order to consult the older manuscript.
If, as stated in the previous post, it was a kind of commissioned work, the writer certainly made notes of previous versions, from which he then copied the final version, precisely because parchment was so expensive.
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - Bluetoes101 - 29-10-2025
To look at it another way,
Chaidh Criosda mach
Sa' mhaduinn mhoich
'S fhuair e casan nan each,
Air am bristeadh mu seach.
Chuir e cnaimh ri cnaimh,
Agus feith ri feith,
Agus feòil ri feòil,
Agus craicionn ri craicionn,
'S mar leighis esan sin
Gu'n leighis mise so
As someone who does not know the language I could speculate the same things you do about Voynich text.
However its a charm to fix your horses leg.
Christ went forth
In the early morn
And found the horses' legs
Broken across.
He put bone to bone.
Sinew to sinew,
Flesh to flesh.
And skin to skin;
And as He healed that,
May I heal this.
The repetition and almost-repetition are what make it a charm. A hymn or incantation etc would do similar, or something else meant to summon borrowed power.
This would seem like a much more simple and demonstrable explanation theory, though I'm not saying its that, just that you would need to show good examples of the ideas you have. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 29-10-2025
(29-10-2025, 07:17 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just that you would need to show good examples of the ideas you have. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.
I agree with you one hundred percent, I'm on board, but it requires more time than I thought and more work. And ultimately, it will remain just a theory, I know that. But it would be one that would have a dramatic impact on deciphering the text. Perhaps with the realisation that too little information remains to translate the text.
nice example, by the way...
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - Jorge_Stolfi - 30-10-2025
(29-10-2025, 03:54 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But instead the writing has an effortless flow to it. The writer wrote whole paragraphs without having to pause or to think what should come next. It doesn't seem to show that the writer was having to lift the pen mid-word or between words in order to consult the older manuscript.
The VMS was definitely written on paper first. It would be stupid for anyone to write anything directly from head to vellum.
Once it was written on paper, copying it to vellum would be a mechanical boring task that would surely have been given to a scribe.
That scribe would have to be taught the alphabet, and trained until he could copy it fluently and reliably. That would take only a few hours.
That scribe would not need to understand the language or encoding. And there are several clues that he in fact did not.
(There is also evidence that, sometime in the 600 years after the VMS was written,
large parts of the text and figure outlines were restored by carefully retracing them,
because they had faded to almost invisibility. The scribe who did this restoration
did not know the alphabet, although he may have mostly inferred it as he worked.
But this is still a disputed theory.)
All the best, --stolfi
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 06:55 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(There is also evidence that, sometime in the 600 years after the VMS was written,@ Stolfi: Thank you for your contribution! Do you have any links/sources for this?That would also fit in with my theory. Among other things, I have also been looking deeply into ligatures and brevigraphs. I will be creating a thread on this soon. I have found many interesting ligatures that define some words and letters of the VM differently.
large parts of the text and figure outlines were restored by carefully retracing them,
because they had faded to almost invisibility. The scribe who did this restoration
did not know the alphabet, although he may have mostly inferred it as he worked.
But this is still a disputed theory.)
But, and this is the important thing, here too you quickly notice that many small parts that are actually normal in ligatures and often fulfil an important function only appear extremely rarely. But they do appear. For example, a small superscript 9 at the end of the word for us. (I just can't remember where, if anyone has a text passage for this, thank you).
The problem: if they do appear, why so rarely - that is not normal?
Why would someone use these small characters so few times in the text when many of the other glyphs are ligatures? That doesn't make sense unless the text has actually faded, rendering these small circles, strokes and letters ‘invisible’. That would be a very good indication that a lot of important information is missing from the text.
Conclusion.
If one now imagines that information has been lost both through the copyists and additionally through faded writing, then this fits exactly with the picture I have:
The text is not yet decipherable, simply because too much information has disappeared... However, if one knows this, one might have a small chance...
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 30-10-2025
Hmm. Was the original text completly overwritten, or is this what you mean? Here, you can see quite clearly which passages have been overwritten by the change in contrast. Here, the older writing would not have faded enough to destroy so much information. (or the writer occasionally had too much ink on the nib, which would suggest poor writing...)
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - dashstofsk - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 06:55 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It would be stupid for anyone to write anything directly from head to vellum.
Under the meaningless text / hoax / artificial construction hypothesis it would not be entirely stupid. If the hoaxers had a method of generating meaningless text that they could apply with fluency then there would be no need to first put it on paper.
The manuscript is a deception. The authors intended that no-one should ever be able to read the manuscript. And so long as they were careful to give the text a semblance of genuineness, that it was a product from some distant undiscovered land, fraudulently created to sell on the market for a profit, there would be no need for any grammatical correctness, nor for any delay to first trial-write it all on paper. They could just write the words out as they came.