[Interview] Voynich Ninja interview with Lisa Fagin Davis

[Emma May Smith]

I think that 105r is a change of ink and pen rather than of scribe...although it's also possible that the top part is Scribe 2 and the rest Scribe 3 (as on f. 115r). I went back and forth about 105r, but for my forthcoming piece in Manuscript Studies (coming out in early May) I committed to Scribe 3 for the full page. It is certainly possible that any further dialectal distinctions that are made based on my scribal corpora will help refine my work. For example, if someone discerns orthographic "rules" that are specific to my Scribe 3, and the darker-ink portion of f. 105r doesn't obey those rules but instead reflects Scribe 2 usage, that would then suggest that the top portion should perhaps be re-attributed to Scribe 2. That's exactly the kind of analysis I hope my work will spur.

I also hope that we can define scribes by their "language" now that your work better defines them by their writing. It really is a new outlook on the text which will spur a lot of research. The distinction between Currier A and B has already proven so useful that this further level of distinction (and the "why" behind it) can only be greater.

I feel that, in prospect of scribes being found to have distinctive dialects, we're beginning to answer some key questions about the text.

1. It's much less likely that the text is cryptographic. It wouldn't make sense for each scribe to have their own way of encoding the text. This is even more true if single pages are written by more than one scribe. Anybody reading the text would need to be able to identify the scribe and know their method of encoding.

2. The script is not a simple substitution for an existing script writing a well-established language. We more or less already knew this through statistical analysis. But the language shifting with the scribe reinforces the idea that there isn't a single ideal version of the language which is being transliterated (or at least they can't recreate it). The scribes are perhaps writing according to their understanding of the spoken language which differed between them rather than having a single standard. We might be looking at a language early in its history of literacy, which would also explain the invention of a new script.

3. The size of variation could indicate that the underlying language is natural. Were this to be a text written in a constructed language then the differences between individuals would be small or non-existent. A spoken language could contain a significant level of variation.

4. The variations themselves could indicate relatedness between glyph values. If we observe different scribes writing similar words systematically with one glyph rather than another then it indicates a sound change between their dialects. The different values of a sound change should be phonologically related in ways which obey known laws. /k/ might shift to /g/ but not to /m/.

I feel like I've wandered far from the original point so I'll end here. But it is enough to say that I'm very excited about the new research paths.