[Panel Session] Cryptologic History panel Oct. 19, 2017

[-JKP-]

One of the things SantaColomba points out with visuals is the similarity of "gallows" characters  to litterae elongatae, and certainly there are similarities. He mentions that someone could perhaps try to copy something like that and not know what it is.

I have some sympathy for this idea because some aspects of the VMS text do seem to be created by someone who maybe didn't know what they were reproducing... but if that were the case, then the distribution of the misrepresented shapes would work out the same as they were in the original, which would presumably be a natural language. And yet the distribution (and position) of VMS glyphs does not follow natural language patterns. Even if you collapse some of the symbols into the same ones because the scribe maybe didn't recognize the difference, it doesn't work out statistically.


The Voynich text has its own set of rule-like patterns that are distinctive and pretty consistent, and I don't think they could turn out that way by copying errors alone.