[Blog Post] Scribes of the Voynich Manuscript

[Emma May Smith]

I liked what Lisa says neat the end, about trying to find out how many glyphs there are from a paleographical perspective.

I would love to be involved in that work. I think that (and I'm sure you agree) single glyph sequences have a huge potential to inform this work. But other statistics and patterns should also be brought into play.

I disagree, for example, that [qo] should be considered a single glyph. A word such as [qokeedy] seems to be more strongly related to [okeedy] than to [keedy], suggesting that [q] and [o] are dependent, but not a single glyph. But such arguments would need to be considered carefully and with other evidence.

Sadly I don't know enough about palaeography but I would like to understand how each glyph was written (stroke order and direction). I believe that some rare glyphs could be writing mistakes, where the scribe starting writing one glyph but had meant to write another. This might provide some insights into the links between glyphs.