[Article] Voynich Paleography article

[LisaFaginDavis]

Hi, everyone,

Lots of interesting discussion here! I'm glad my work has generated new ideas. That's what I was hoping for. Claire Bowern's linguistic study that takes my work into account will be out soon.

Circular diagrams: I rotated the diagrams as I read them so as to see each character right-side-up. I don't think writing in a circle requires any particular skill or expertise, although it does imply that the page was rotated while writing. It may indicate a scribe's particular interest, but I don't think it indicates a particular skill.

In terms of scribes/subjects, here's how "my" scribes sort:

1: botanical, 57v, recipes
2: botanical, rose dorse, a few lines on f. 115r
3: botanical (bifolia 58/65 and 94/95), starred section
4: circular foldouts and astrological diagrams, rose
5: botanical (bifolia 41/48 and 57/66 [except for 57v])

But we should always remember that there are at least fourteen leaves missing, and we have no idea who wrote them or what their contents were. Because the leaves seem to be out of order in some places, we can't even guess what topics were on the missing leaves. Ff. 59-64 (three bifolia) MIGHT have been botanical and MIGHT have been written by scribes 3 or 5, but there's just no way to know.

As for identifying any of these scribes writing in another language, I think it would be extremely difficult. If I were going to try it (which I'm not), I would focus on Voynichese glyphs that most resemble characters in the Roman alphabet or Arabic numerals, like EVA a, c, d, l, o, q, y. Others have tried this already. The problem is that none of those characters in Voynichese show scribal characteristics that could easily be matched with the same character written by one of the same scribes in a different character set. That doesn't mean it CAN'T be done, but it would be take a lot to convince me (and others) that the identification was plausible.