[Article] Voynich Article in The Atlantic

[pfeaster]

Part of the discipline of paleography has to do with ductus, that is, the movement of the hand holding the writing implement. The same scribe might write the same character faster or slower or more or less carefully over the course of their lifetime, but generally speaking, the platonic ideal of that character won't change. For example, I've been writing [&] the same way my whole life, but over the course of time even if the character may look different, the series of penstrokes I use, their sequence and direction, will remain consistent.

I can well imagine this being true of "ordinary" writing, once a person's habits have stabilized.

Do you know of any studies of the handwriting of someone who has devised a new writing system and has then gradually internalized it and adjusted it over time?  I'm not sure how often this situation is likely to have come up within the field.

Here's a little raw material, for whatever it might be worth:

Back when I was around thirteen or fourteen, I designed a private script for use among a small group of my friends.  Here's one of the first things I wrote in it:

   

Here are the first few entries in a diary I kept in the same script a year or two later:

   

Here's something I wrote around five years after coming up with the script -- a copy I'd made for myself of some of a friend's poetry in high school:

   

Today, around forty years after first designing the script, I'm definitely out of practice, but I just grabbed a random book off the shelf and copied out the first paragraph while trying not to think too much about what I was doing (and I can spot at least one actual mistake):

   

Finally, here's something written by one of my friends who had also learned the script: