16-04-2021, 04:41 PM
Another idea in this line of thought: There is a logical reason why an author's attempt to write an extreme version of a lipogrammatic text, such as one without using any of the letters ABC, could have compelled him to invent his own new writing system in order to do so:
It is extremely difficult to compose a lipogram, any lipogram, without making a mistake and allowing the prohibited letter or letters to slip by one's notice and sneak into the text. I recall that Ernest Vincent Wright talked about having to literally tie down and disable the "E" key on his typewriter in order to write Gadsby without making a mistake and letting a word with "e" slip into his novel. Full disclosure: last night I tried my hand at writing my own English extreme lipogrammatic text without using any of the letters ABC. I can do it, but it is a brutally intense, exhausting process. I managed to write 953 (nine hundred fifty-three, see, no ABC's there!) words of such text. The point is, I kept making mistakes, catching them with the convenient Ctrl-F "search and find" function, and going back and fixing them. You saw above in my analysis of Petrus Riga's lipogrammatic verses that he made occasional mistakes as well. The editor of the edition I read and linked to above caught a few of them and offered fixes of his own, but it seems both author and editor missed "Christumque" in the "Sine Q" verses, which should have been somehow fixable by rewriting the phrase and clause with "et" instead of "-que", albeit the literary quality, such as it was, would suffer I imagine. The point is, it is extremely difficult to compose a lipogram without making mistakes.
Well, the author of the Voynich manuscript did not have the convenient Ctrl-F "search and find" function. They didn't have typewriter keys they could tie down and disable, or printing press letters they could remove from the character set when printing, as an extra final safeguard against allowing the prohibited letter or letters to slip into the text. They couldn't erase mistakes as easily as we can now. From an extreme "purist" lipogram perspective, even the appearance of the prohibited letter or letters on the manuscript page, even if corrected, might have been considered unacceptable.
The author was not satisfied with such flawed lipograms, so he found a solution: Invent his own writing system, and leave out any letters for A, B, and C entirely! Now he could write his lipogram and not have to worry about an overlooked a, b, or c mistakenly slipping into his text and spoiling his beautiful lipogram. And thus the writing system of the Voynich manuscript text was born.
Such a person may well have also been the kind of person who simply could not stand to spoil the appearance of his manuscript and text by making any corrections to his writing at all. And so he didn't.
I can tell you from my own extreme "no ABC" English lipogram writing experience that eventually one decides to allow words that normally contain a prohibited letter, but one writes them without the letter, with a substitute letter, or in some abbreviated or other different way. That could explain, for example, [qokedy qokeedy] as "nese neese" standing for "nece neece" (modern "nice niece"). It could also explain other perhaps strangely abbreviated words.
It is extremely difficult to compose a lipogram, any lipogram, without making a mistake and allowing the prohibited letter or letters to slip by one's notice and sneak into the text. I recall that Ernest Vincent Wright talked about having to literally tie down and disable the "E" key on his typewriter in order to write Gadsby without making a mistake and letting a word with "e" slip into his novel. Full disclosure: last night I tried my hand at writing my own English extreme lipogrammatic text without using any of the letters ABC. I can do it, but it is a brutally intense, exhausting process. I managed to write 953 (nine hundred fifty-three, see, no ABC's there!) words of such text. The point is, I kept making mistakes, catching them with the convenient Ctrl-F "search and find" function, and going back and fixing them. You saw above in my analysis of Petrus Riga's lipogrammatic verses that he made occasional mistakes as well. The editor of the edition I read and linked to above caught a few of them and offered fixes of his own, but it seems both author and editor missed "Christumque" in the "Sine Q" verses, which should have been somehow fixable by rewriting the phrase and clause with "et" instead of "-que", albeit the literary quality, such as it was, would suffer I imagine. The point is, it is extremely difficult to compose a lipogram without making mistakes.
Well, the author of the Voynich manuscript did not have the convenient Ctrl-F "search and find" function. They didn't have typewriter keys they could tie down and disable, or printing press letters they could remove from the character set when printing, as an extra final safeguard against allowing the prohibited letter or letters to slip into the text. They couldn't erase mistakes as easily as we can now. From an extreme "purist" lipogram perspective, even the appearance of the prohibited letter or letters on the manuscript page, even if corrected, might have been considered unacceptable.
The author was not satisfied with such flawed lipograms, so he found a solution: Invent his own writing system, and leave out any letters for A, B, and C entirely! Now he could write his lipogram and not have to worry about an overlooked a, b, or c mistakenly slipping into his text and spoiling his beautiful lipogram. And thus the writing system of the Voynich manuscript text was born.
Such a person may well have also been the kind of person who simply could not stand to spoil the appearance of his manuscript and text by making any corrections to his writing at all. And so he didn't.
I can tell you from my own extreme "no ABC" English lipogram writing experience that eventually one decides to allow words that normally contain a prohibited letter, but one writes them without the letter, with a substitute letter, or in some abbreviated or other different way. That could explain, for example, [qokedy qokeedy] as "nese neese" standing for "nece neece" (modern "nice niece"). It could also explain other perhaps strangely abbreviated words.