Vord paradigm tool

[Torsten]

We don't know how the MS was created, and for me, the option that it is a fair copy by scribes who did not understand what they were copying, remains a possibility. In such a case, errors are likely to be abundant.

Even in normal manuscripts that are perfectly legible, and that were copied by professional scribes, there are some typical mistakes like copying a piece of text twice in a row, or jumping to the wrong source line while copying. The scribe should have noticed this as he could understand what he was copying, but in the end he is human and can make mistakes.

The text floats around the illustrations and the lines fill out the available space. No text was scraped out or crossed out. No helper lines were drawn to prevent sloped text lines like on folio 105r in lines 9a and 10. This either indicates that the scribe did made the layout during writing or that the original text layout was copied. 

In the first case the scribe was knowing enough to adapt the text. In the second case we still see the original layout. If this is indeed the case the length of a line would work like an error detector. By copying a piece of text twice the scribe would run out of space at the end of a line and by missing out something some unused space would be left over. This means the scribe didn't made any errors and we still see the original layout or the scribe was able to adapt the text to the new layout. Therefore I find the idea of a scribe who did not understand what he was copying as explanation for weird words unconvincing.