my suggestion about the author of MV

[Anton]

Here's what I wrote on the subject four years ago:

Some apparent explanations would be:

a) the scribe was lame;
b) the inscription was made in inappropriate circumstances (in the night, during a drive, in a hurry etc.);
c) the inscription is not original, but a copy from the source, the language of which was unknown to the scribe.

The option c) is a very intriguing one. It explains almost every point. Suppose you encounter some inscription in a language unknown to you (e.g. Arabic), and you believe it to be of great importance. So you decide to copy it. So far that neither words nor even individual letters are familiar to you, you would copy it in the same way as you would copy a drawing. In this, you are likely to introduce uncertainty, mistakes, uneven spacing and all sorts of confusion, so that even a native Arabic speaker will later have difficulties in interpreting your copy. Furthermore, if the original text contains corrections (the meaning of which you are not able to interpret, and thus you try to copy them as they are), they will probably look quite embarrassing in your copy.

This explanation undermines our core assumption of the German-aware scribe. So, in turn, German colour codes, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and some other (like “lab” in f116v) marginalia need then to be explained in a different way. But the main counter argument against option c) is that there are two Voynichese words in the beginning of line 3, and, without any doubt, they constitute an integral part of that line. It is unlikely that one would wind words that he does know into the text that he does not understand. One might argue that the Voynichese words are also copied; but developing the discourse in this way will bring us to the inevitable conclusion that the whole VMS with all its marginalia and colour codes (some of which are painted over) is a copy, which is somewhat overcomplicated.

So the strange “careless” appearance of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. still lacks a decisive explanation.