f20v - Did the scribe make a mistake?

[aStobbart]

As I find myself with a lot of free time latelly, I am currently performing my first analisis of the voynichese characters, and maybe this has been discussed before, but this particular character took my attention:



In the voynichese.com site (which uses eva) this particual character is an "s". It clearly differs from the other "s"s in the same folio. Do you think maybe the scribe made a mistake? it looks like he tried to write something like eva "99" and then corrected



I know there is the assumption that there are no error corrections in the VMS (D'Imperio noted this if I recall). Has this particual character in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. been discussed before?

[-JKP-]

There are lots of corrections in the VMS. Taken as a whole, they are not numerous, but it's 200 pages, so the percentage can be low even if there are quite a few.

I agree that this is probably one of them.


Also, look at the glyph before it. Is it a loose d or is it a tight g? (I wrestle with this constantly when working on transcriptions, some of the glyphs are even more ambiguous than this one.)

[-JKP-]

I can't tell what is going on under this glyph, it looks like a train-wreck ol with r written more clearly on top of it, but I really can't tell.

Usually I can figure out what the correction is, but not this one.

[nablator]

See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[-JKP-]

Also note how the 4o has a long stem. I've blogged about this, but it happens a few times in the manuscript and might not be a mistake.

[aStobbart]

I agree that this is probably one of them.

If that is the case, what would the "correct" character be? I can imagine writing that character in one single stroke like this, starting from up and going downwards:



My guess is he tried to write s and wrote r by mistake, then corrected.

Also, look at the glyph before it. Is it a loose d or is it a tight g? (I wrestle with this constantly when working on transcriptions, some of the glyphs are even more ambiguous than this one.)

If I had to guess I'd say it is d

[-JKP-]

This is what it looks like to me. I cannot tell what is underneath. It looks like a badly drawn EVA-e followed by EVA-l or something not Voynichese at all (with the second shape having a tail to the bottom-left like the one on l).  That strange stuff appears to have been over-written with a normally drawn r:

   

[Mark Knowles]

This is, in my opinion, one of the great myths of the Voynich, namely that there are no corrections. I have not studied all the text, but wherever I have looked there have certainly on occasions been what appear to me to be corrections.

The myth, repeated in documentaries and the like, is that the writing of the Voynich must have been some superhuman feat as through the 200+ pages there is not a single sign of correction. This might make for a good narrative, increasing the allure and mystery of the manuscript, but it is deeply misleading. When I first started looking at the Voynich I believed that to be the case as it seemed to be the prevailing wisdom, but this idea just confuses and misdirects researchers.

[-JKP-]

There aren't a lot of corrections. Certainly not enough to skew statistics. It is, for the most part, a pretty clean manuscript. Clean enough to suggest that maybe it was copied from a previous codex or from a prior draft for this codex.


The ambiguous characters are more problematic in terms of studying the text. There are many instances in which a and o are indistinguishable from one another. So much so, that it makes you wonder if there is a third character that is deliberately in between.

[Koen G]

There aren't a lot of visible corrections. But I was surprised to learn a while ago that scraping is possible without leaving visible marks. So how to we know they weren't scraping all the time?