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+--- Thread: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections (/thread-2658.html)
[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 13-02-2019
On the one hand, I am quite sure there are scribal errors in the VMS, there are things that LOOK like errors (are out of character with the rest of the textual patterns) and there are places where actual corrections can be seen.
On the other hand, Jewish scribes were taught to copy the Torah WITHOUT ERRORS. They were simply not permitted to make errors. Out it goes and start again.
So... where does the VMS fit? I don't know. There are errors that may be identifiable, and then there are errors that would not be evident unless one understood the structure or meaning behind the text.
I don't get the feeling that the number of errors in the VMS is large (there's a fair degree of consistency). The feeling I get is that it may have been pre-written (pre-ciphered?) and then copied. It's fairly orderly and tidy. It seems like almost an impossible task to create the rosettes page in one go. Getting things to fit comfortably in a circle (and in a group of circles) is not easy. Usually it requires rough sketches first.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - nickpelling - 20-02-2019
(13-02-2019, 10:29 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, Jewish scribes were taught to copy the Torah WITHOUT ERRORS. They were simply not permitted to make errors. Out it goes and start again.
OK, so we can rule out the possibility that the Voynich Manuscript is a copy of the Torah. :-p
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - MarcoP - 20-02-2019
(20-02-2019, 04:06 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(13-02-2019, 10:29 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, Jewish scribes were taught to copy the Torah WITHOUT ERRORS. They were simply not permitted to make errors. Out it goes and start again.
OK, so we can rule out the possibility that the Voynich Manuscript is a copy of the Torah. :-p
Can we?
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Sotheby's Wrote:An Extremely Rare Medieval Torah Scroll from Spain
... Also noteworthy is the fact that in line 39 of the Song of Moses, the words gam bahur (both youth) and gam betulah (and maiden) in Deut. 32:25 appear together; however, gam bahur is written over a correction.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - -JKP- - 20-02-2019
Good link, Marco, very interesting.
Did you notice in the third picture that the letters at the end have been stretched out to pad the line (to double-justify the column of text)?
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - -JKP- - 22-02-2019
(20-02-2019, 04:06 PM)nickpelling Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(13-02-2019, 10:29 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On the other hand, Jewish scribes were taught to copy the Torah WITHOUT ERRORS. They were simply not permitted to make errors. Out it goes and start again.
OK, so we can rule out the possibility that the Voynich Manuscript is a copy of the Torah. :-p
In the early days I did actually look into this possibility, but that was in late 2007, before I noticed the positional structure of the VMS text.
By early 2008, I had gone through the plants numerous times and ID'ed what I could (and needed a break from plants) and started paying attention to how Voynichese was constructed. That's when I started creating my first Voynich font and, a little later, my first transcript.
I noticed the pilcrow-like peculiarities in gallows characters the first time I saw it, and the tokens seemed a bit short to me, but I had NOT grokked that the same glyphs tended to show up in the same positions in tokens, even after months of looking at the plant sections. It wasn't until I started creating the transcript that I had that Aha! moment and kicked myself (numerous times) for not noticing it. It's one of those things that once you see it, you feel like a complete idiot for not noticing it right away.
.
So... my pre-transcript notes from 2007 show that the Torah and the Quran are about the same length. Each has approximately 80,000 words.
Tokens in the VMS are a little more difficult to assess. There appears to be a pattern of spaces and half-spaces in the VMS, and there's a certain amount of consistency to where the half-spaces are found. I have four transcripts now and one of them includes half-spaces.
Are the half-spaces the same as word-spaces or are they something else? I tend to think they are something else because the tokens would be extremely short (compared to natural language) if the half-spaces were counted as spaces. The half-spaces seem to delineate common "fragments" (I'm hesitant to use that word, but it will have to do until I have a better grasp of the purpose of half-spaces, if any).
So, for the purposes of counting, if we treat the half-spaces as "not a space", the VMS has approximately 35,000 tokens, about half of the Torah or Quran.
There are a little more than than 300,000 characters in the Torah and about half of that in the VMS. So the proportion of tokens-to-glyphs is very similar (not surprising for an abjad script in which the vowels are absent or expressed with dots rather than what we call "letters"), while the total count in the VMS is about half.
Hebrew has a lot of root words (in which the only difference between related words is the vowels or one character), so in that respect it's tantalizing to think the repetitious character of the VMS might be an abjad based on a system of root words with the vowels omitted, but Hebrew is NOT rigidly positional like the VMS—the letters move around within words much more than in Voynichese. Maybe the VMS is some sort of abjad (perhaps a synthetic abjad), it's closer to Hebrew structure than many languages, but... when you look at glyph position, then the differences loom large (I'm sure you already know this, but I'm describing my thinking process at the time).
Once I realized that, I put the Torah idea on the back burner, but I was impressed with the skill of the Jewish Torah-scribes.
It's quite an achievement to write more than a quarter of a million characters without mistakes (or with only one mistake as in Marco's example).
A Torah cannot be used if it contains mistakes (I don't know whether it can be used as an exemplar, but it's not supposed to be used for synagogue services). How and whether mistakes can be fixed depends on the interpretation of the rules. Some say the mistakes can be fixed, others say one must start again. Those who say mistakes can be fixed still have very strict rules for HOW they must be fixed. If a letter is missing, everything that comes after it must be removed (I assume they mean it must be scraped clean), the error fixed, and all the rest of the text written again. If G-d's name is in there, well, you can't erase that, so then you do have to start again.
Given the difficulty of doing this if the mistake is found a long way back, the scribe would be pretty motivated to try not to make mistakes in the first place.
It takes a skilled scribe about four to six months to copy a Torah scroll. So, perhaps we can guess that it took three months or so to add the text to the VMS (assuming the scribe worked from something pre-written in Voynichese to work out the system of glyphs). I don't know how long it would take to do all the drawings (I would have to copy a couple and time it), but there are many of them and the rosette folio would be quite challenging (the details are very small). It could have taken weeks or months depending on whether preliminary sketches were done (I doubt if the "map" page could have been drawn in one go).
So, even though I backburnered the idea of it being the Torah or Quran, I did learn a few interesting factoids along the way and I still haven't completely abandoned the idea of it being an abjad (perhaps synthetic). I think the probability of natural-language-substitution-code is low, but natural-language-something-else-code, well... maybe.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - Koen G - 23-02-2019
Apparent shortage of corrections doesn't equal shortage of mistakes though. Maybe the VM is so full of mistakes that they didn't even bother correcting them.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - -JKP- - 23-02-2019
There are definitely corrections in the VMS. How many mistakes there are (and uncorrected mistakes) is hard to say, but it is somewhat consistent in many ways.
It's actually fairly simple compared to natural language. The same "phrases" over and over. It's harder to make mistakes when there is so little variety.
I'm reluctant to hazard a guess as to what the error rate is, but as a guess based on my subjective impression after creating four transcripts, I'd guess maybe a couple per big-plant folio and perhaps up to half a dozen on the pages with dense text. This is absolutely a guess.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - Koen G - 23-02-2019
Let's say a certain handful of corrections per page. Would that be significantly fewer than in "normal" manuscripts?
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - -JKP- - 23-02-2019
They vary so widely. The manuscripts in book hands are mostly by professional scribes and I'm sure some of them are near-perfect.
The ones copied by students so they can have a copy of a text book (which are usually in cursive or hybrid cursive/bookhand) probably have their share of errors.
And then there are spelling variations and dialect variations, and imperfect translations (a lot of imperfect translations).
I don't know. It's like comparing 20 different kinds of fruit.
RE: The Impossibility of Double Gallows - ReneZ - 24-02-2019
While there is probably no confusion about the meaning of 'corrections' , it is worth considering what is really meant with 'mistakes'.
For me, this depends a lot on the scenario one has in mind for how the MS was created.
In the past, the perceived lack of corrections has been considered an argument that the text in the MS is perhaps meaningless. It is of course not that simple.
A 'mistake' implies that something should have been done one way, which is correct, but was done in other way, which is not correct. For spelling of words, this is a modern problem. Typical mistakes in medieval manuscripts are copying mistakes. This would apply to the Voynich MS only if the text were a copy of some other text. This is possible, but whether this is how the MS was created remains one of the unanswered questions.
The fact that there are emendations does not even necessarily mean that there was a mistake. It could also mean that something did not come out clearly on the first writing. Correction of mistakes was usually done by scraping, and I can't remember right now if there is any evidence of this in the MS.
There is plenty of evidence of a 'second pass', both in the text (as forum member Wladimir has demonstrated beyond all doubt) and in the illustrations (pointed out especially by Nick Pelling), but I think this could also be for the reason I just mentioned.
One of many possible scenarios for the creation of the Voynich MS is that there was a draft created by its 'master mind', which was copied on parchment by a paid scribe. In this scenario, the scribe might or might not understand what he was copying, but it could be that he was paid for making a correct copy.
He might make corrections in order to convince his client to pay him, and the text might still be meaningless...