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+--- Thread: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? (/thread-4996.html)
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - Jorge_Stolfi - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 07:53 AM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have any links/sources for this?
There are two threads about it:
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And there may be other scattered posts. I am trying to gather all those
post into a single document...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 09:24 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The manuscript is a deception...I agree with an opinion I once read here (unfortunately, I don't remember who wrote it):
Thirty pages would have been more than enough... but writing so many pages on expensive parchment, and with a relatively consistent system, as a hoax makes no sense at all...
To come back to the thread content:
A hoax wouldn't have so many repetitions, that would be too conspicuous....
As my professor always said: check your theses with your grandmother's logic, that helps you not to get carried away...
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - dashstofsk - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 01:27 PM)JoJo_Jost Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thirty pages would have been more than enough... but writing so many pages on expensive parchment, and with a relatively consistent system, as a hoax makes no sense at all...
You are making the assumption that the hoaxers wrote the whole manuscript before trying to find a buyer for it. That would have been risky. The effort might have been for nothing.
A more plausible scenario is that the writers, initially unsure how far they could go with the deception, started by writing a small piece, worked hard on it to make it look genuine, presented it as a rare piece from a distant land where they used a strange alphabet and where they knew about the secret sciences, and hoped to find a buyer for it. Eventually they did find a buyer and that gave them the enthusiasm to write a second piece. Then success with that one also. And with the one after. Each piece being on a different topic. With each success their greed and motivation grew stronger. When eventually it was over someone bound all the sections together for the convenience of having all works in the unknown writing in one manuscript.
In effect the manuscript is not one manuscript but a collection of individual pieces of work.
As success and reward came with each piece the author believed they could relax their standard. Confident that further writing would be certain of success they started to get lazy and the quality of the pages started to decline. Perhaps the dazzling 3x2 sheet was the initial offering. Perhaps the herbals with the careless drawings were the last.
But after each piece the authors paused. They did not want to feed their patrons too soon. They had to guard against the suspicion that the manuscripts were being written on demand. But with each pause they lost some fluency in their ‘method’. The language of the new work was slightly different to what came before.
This scenario neatly gives a plausible hypothesis for the motivation for the manuscript, how it was written, why the authors went to the trouble, can suggest the chronological order of the sections, can explain the wide subject matter, can explain the different language clusters, can explain the differences in the quality of the sections.
Does it at least make some sense?
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - oshfdk - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 04:10 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does it at least make some sense?
If it is a hoax, then this sequence of events looks very plausible to me.
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - JoJo_Jost - 30-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 04:10 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Does it at least make some sense?
The theory has an internal logic, but does it make sense? It is just one of many theories—like mine, of course. And it is unproven, so far—like mine so far. As long as I cannot provide a translation, it is all speculation.
Didelideli—I have a theory.
But this is not (!) a thread about "hoax or not"
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - dashstofsk - 31-10-2025
(30-10-2025, 06:55 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMS was definitely written on paper first.
You will need to give your reasons for believing this.
I cannot believe that it is definitely ‘definite’. I can use logic and statistics to give grounds for presuming it not to be a copy of some prior manuscript, paper or otherwise.
To begin, the actual manuscript size is rather small. Only 9.3” by 6.4”. Since paper was more affordable and if there was a paper original would the paper pages not have been of a larger size? Perhaps the paper original, being an initial draft, would have included a lot of corrections, amendments? Perhaps, unlike VMS, there was no need to have to stuff quires 13 and 20 right up to the edges with small writing? Perhaps JoJo_Jost is right about the copyist being someone who had no hand in writing the original? Perhaps the original writers had a different handwriting weight to any of hands 1,2,3,4,5.?
Unless the manuscript and its original version we're both written in the same weight of handwriting and on identical size sheets then line breaks would be different in the two versions. If for instance the paper original had a line with 12 words and the VMS page had space only for 11 words the 12th word would become the first word on the line after. Any such misalignment would have propagated down through the remaining lines of a paragraph, with each line shifted by one more word. Line first words in the VMS would not have corresponded with line first words in the paper original but would have been copied from any line word position.
Also because the writing in the big text pages of quires 13 and 20 fills the available space right up to the left and right margins of the pages it is clear that the copyist made no effort to preserve any line breaks.
And yet the VMS line first words have a peculiar oddity, as discussed sometime ago in
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and with more recent investigation in
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In particular please do read my latest post in this last thread about character repeats. The statistically significant discrepancy in the number of repeats in line first word vertical pairs is awaiting an explanation.
But given that the VMS first words were copied from any possible line word position in the original the words would have been representative of the whole document and any first word or last word effects would have dissolved in the shuffle. There would have been more uniformity and there would not have been the high statistical confidence level for the odd behaviour. But this is not so.
I rest my case.
RE: copy of an older, barely legible manuscript? - Jorge_Stolfi - 31-10-2025
(31-10-2025, 01:38 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(30-10-2025, 06:55 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMS was definitely written on paper first.You will need to give your reasons for believing this.
I already gave one: it would be insane for anyone to write anything directly from one's head onto vellum, considering how expensive vellum was, and how hard it is to correct errors.
Another evidence for the Scribe copying from a draft is the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
Quote:the actual manuscript size is rather small. Only 9.3” by 6.4”. Since paper was more affordable and if there was a paper original would the paper pages not have been of a larger size? Perhaps the paper original, being an initial draft, would have included a lot of corrections, amendments? Perhaps, unlike VMS, there was no need to have to stuff quires 13 and 20 right up to the edges with small writing?
Yes! And that is another good argument for the book having started as a paper draft. Because writing those small letters with fine pen on those small pages was a task that required non-trivial care and skill, hence was better left to a "professional" Scribe.
Quote:Unless the manuscript and its original version we're both written in the same weight of handwriting and on identical size sheets then line breaks would be different in the two versions.
And indeed the line breaks in the VMS paragraphs were almost certainly chosen by the Scribe, ignoring the line breaks in the Author's draft. That is what scribes would normally do when transcribing running text from a draft or from another book.
There is plenty of evidence of that. Like pages You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f113r, where the Scribe changed the line width mid-paragraph because he found that the vellum was bad near the right margin.
Quote:And yet the VMS line first words have a peculiar oddity
There are already some confirmed explanations for those line-start and line-end anomalies, including the side effects of the Scribe's natural line breaking algorithm and the subjectivity when transcribing word spaces. Those may not be sufficient to explain the line start and end anomalies, but there may be other causes of the same general nature which we haven´t thought of yet -- that explain the anomalies, without implying that the line breaks were chosen by the Author and are somehow semantically significant.
All the best, --stolfi