A disquieting thought

[davidjackson]

In the shower the other morning (where I do my best thinking) I wondered whether evidence that the grammar changes in concordance with scribal hands gives weight to the theory that the text is meaningless.

In other words, if there are different scribes, and each scribe has a slightly different grammar, are they all using their own interpretation of the same generating mechanism to create slightly different nonsense texts?

If they were working off the same encoding mechanism, then you wouldn't see these differences, as the text would always be encoded in the same fashion.

Of course, we could explain this away by suggesting that each scribe had their own style of writing, and it's just the way they put together the underlying plaintext that causes the differences.

[Koen G]

Let me turn it around: what if the reason for requiring different scribes is also the reason why their texts are different?

For example, different source languages could result in different "grammatical" properties. One scribe does the parts in Latin, another in Greek and a third in the vernacular. Or one scribe works on a text that is heavily abbreviated, contains lots of numbers, or anything else that might influence the resulting ciphertext.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's possible that properties of the source text caused differences in the ciphertext, and different scribes might have specialized in different source texts.

[davidjackson]

Already wondered about that. I think you would see far greater differences if the source languages changed so dramatically as Latin and Greek. Maybe not if they were writing in similar vernaculars... dialects of old French, Occitan, etc.

[Antonio García Jiménez]

What if there were no grammar or words, but only individual glyphs that are combined according to certain rules but with a wide margin of freedom?

If the glyphs are symbols that each have a reference in the real or mental world of the scribe, the generator mechanism can allow different combinations of glyphs without losing the global meaning of the message.

[davidjackson]

What if there were no grammar or words, but only individual glyphs that are combined according to certain rules but with a wide margin of freedom?

Then there would be such a wide range of decryption scenarios that the original text would likely be lost for ever.

[nablator]

In the shower the other morning (where I do my best thinking) I wondered whether evidence that the grammar changes in concordance with scribal hands gives weight to the theory that the text is meaningless.

Grammar? Actual grammar or vocabulary?

If they were working off the same encoding mechanism, then you wouldn't see these differences, as the text would always be encoded in the same fashion.

Encoding does not have to be deterministic.

[davidjackson]

Grammar? Actual grammar or vocabulary?

Think Currier

[Koen G]

The problem with questions like these is that we still don't know enough about what Voynichese is. So there are many answers, but they all rely on a different hypothetical scenario.

[MarcoP]

Actually, huge differences in word structure can also be observed in the work of a single scribe. For instance, Lisa's Scribe 1 wrote both Herbal-A and the Pharma/Small-Plants pages. EVA:eol occurs in 2% of Herbal-A words and an amazing 10% of Pharma words.

[Antonio García Jiménez]

I think the problem lies in assuming that there is a phonetic text. The message may function like the Lego pieces because each piece has its own meaning. There is some freedom in placing them.

Every time I see the misnamed Recipes section with all those pages full of glyphs, I tell myself: That I don't understand this doesn't mean that it didn't make sense to those who did it.