[split] Implications of multiple scribes

[RenegadeHealer]

Renegade, that is exactly what I think may have happened in the VM, since it might explain the reduced phoneme inventory and some of the reduced entropy. What keeps me from embracing the theory is that I don't see how it could lead to the positional rigidity. This feels planned rather than the result of loss-by-difficult-transcription.

That's how I see it, as well. A miscopied manuscript or mistranscribed oral dictation wouldn't come out like Voynichese. The VMS text is strongly positional and almost alarmingly consistent.

@Koen and @-JKP-, both of you guys wrote in the Missionaries thread about how many writing systems were invented by missionaries, for the purpose of imparting scripture to illiterate peoples. I'm trying to square this in my mind right now with the idea of a scribe who speaks the language poorly if at all, and incompletely understands the language's phonology. In a case like this, the way he comes up with to put the sounds he hears into writing might be very systematic, but nevertheless based on a flawed understanding of what sounds differ from what other sounds, and when it matters. From what you've learned about the history of writing systems, is a poorly-designed de novo writing system, that records a spoken language ambiguously but sticks around anyway, a thing historically?

One possible example I can think of is Wade-Giles Romanization of Mandarin Chinese. WGR levels the distinctions between a couple of palatal and retroflex consonants. When used without the apostrophe (often), it levels the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants. When used without tone-marking diacritics (usually), it levels Mandarin Chinese's entire tonal nature. It's dying a slow death in favor of the far superior Pinyin, but I still encounter it every now and then. I can't imagine it would be easy for a native Chinese speaker to read a paragraph of nothing but WGR, for comprehension or out loud to other people. WGR is systematic. Characters in it are far more positionally rigid than in languages that natively use the Roman alphabet. But for all that beautiful rigidity, WGR is problematically over-simple, in a way that doesn't do justice to the phonology of Chinese.