(04-04-2024, 08:01 AM)Scarecrow wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have always considered the irregularities that @nablator mentions to be traits of easy, fluid, writing.
It is clear that scribes were not skillful, some of them especially, there was also the need to break the flow to get ink every now and then... but that many irregularities is evidence, in the context of this thread, of uneasiness, of not being able to write more than a few glyphs (a "vord" at most) without breaking the flow, looking elsewhere. To me, this strongly suggests that:
- the text of the VM is not a copy of an identical written text, that would be much easier to write fluidly without difficulties,
- the functional (meaningful maybe) chunks of text are often smaller than a vord, the scribes often put a small gap (or vertical offset) consciously or unconsciously to separate them,
- the scribes didn't always know (or care) where spaces should be: spaces don't matter.
All this together is consistent with a verbose substitution cipher or similar, where the ciphertext is written one glyph or several glyphs at a time, requiring a break (not on the page) after each functional chunk to get the next from a source that cannot be memorized (therefore not a simple substitution cipher, something a bit more elaborate).