[split] Implications of multiple scribes

[elieD]

I like the idea that the manuscript is two people transcribing what an other was saying, without them necessarily knowing the language of this third person

I like the idea, but I'm not sure I like its implications. Transcription of a language one doesn't understand is almost always fairly lossy. I once briefly worked for a hospital that hired a second-rate medical transcription service. This service was based in a foreign country, where English is spoken widely but not natively. The company clearly did not vet its scribes for fluent English comprehension. Some of the mistakes I would find in the transcriptions of my notes were subtle and understandable, but made a crucial difference in the meaning. The issue was usually the scribe being unable to reliably distinguish between very similar sounds, that his/her native language didn't distinguish. "He had a pain" became "He had a pen", in one memorable example. Usually these problems could be sorted out and corrected by a native speaker who knew the context well. But when we're dealing with the VMs, we have very little context, and no indication of whether there are any native speakers of the original language behind it. If Voynichese really is a case of mis-transcription of a poorly understood language, it's not at all clear to me that the original text is recoverable.

" it's not at all clear to me that the original text is recoverable." => And this could exactly be why hundreds of years later there's still people talking about it
It's absolutely not satisfying to think that it could be impossible...but it could be.
Though I think that with large advances in Artificial Intelligence we will be able to come up with some translations.
At this point it's very useful to ask ourselves, not just what the VMS means, but also why no one succeeded in its translation.

I would like to know what was the usage during Middle Age when you found someone with an unknown language. Let's say a guy speaking old Turkish ends up in front of two french monks in France. Could it be possible for them to think: "This guy is speaking an unknown language, we will write what we hear and invent a new alphabet?"