[Article] Voynich Paleography article

[LisaFaginDavis]

Hi LisaFaginDavis,
I was wondering is it possible to say anything about the skill level of the scribes ?
More specifically:

a) Do all 5 have a similar skill level at writing text ?

b) If there was a scale, sort of like 0-for a beginner to 10- for a professional scribe, would it be possible to attribute a rough value to the scribes skills and what would that value be ?

These are great questions, but really difficult to answer. I tend to think of Scribe 1 as the most "legible" (which is, of course, a ridiculous word to use when referring to a fundamentally non-legible script), that is, the easiest to transcribe. So by that standard, I might say that Scribe 1 is the "best" of them. This scribe's writing is broadly spaced and seems to have been written more slowly and carefully.

On the other hand, the work of Scribe 1 includes a large number of inconsistencies and "mistakes" (by which I mean glyphs that are not consistent with the way Voynichese tends to be written). The work of Scribe 2 includes relatively few of these inconsistencies. So perhaps that means that Scribe 2 is "better" than Scribe 1. 

I think it is impossible to truly compare or classify the various scribes relative to one another without being able to read what they're writing. Only then will we be able to judge how good each scribe is at conveying the content they are trying to preserve.