[Article] Voynich Article in The Atlantic

[pfeaster]

The question I have has to do with the subsequent assumption that 'five hands' means there were five scribes. Five scribes necessarily constitute five individuals, and suddenly there's this small group of people communicating in this unknown language.

The question is, to what extent might a person's writing style be influenced by injury to the fingers etc., or by a progressive disease such as arthritis?

I'm not sure disease or injury would have changed the factors on which the "five scribes" hypothesis is based.  They center on abstract forms of glyphs that don't seem likely to have been affected by a writer's physical state.  On the few occasions I've encountered documents written by someone whose writing definitely suffered from a hand injury -- it looks wobbly and the person explicitly wrote about the injury and difficulty -- you'd never mistake the handwriting itself for that of another person.

That said, I wish I knew more than I do about the dynamics of people learning to write, and especially adults learning to write unfamiliar scripts.

For example, Athanasius Kircher reportedly learned Coptic, including its distinctive alphabet, during the 1630s.  I don't know whether specimens of his handwritten Coptic survive spanning the time from his first fumbling efforts (ca. 1633) to the proficiency he must have gained by the time he wrote his Coptic grammar (published 1636).  I'd be surprised, however, if the ways in which he wrote each of the Coptic glyphs didn't change over those years as his habits evolved and then stabilized, or as he returned to the subject after being away from it for a while (if that ever happened).

Can anyone point to any literature in paleography or forensic handwriting analysis dealing with this specific kind of scenario?