Variation of glyph forms within single pages

[pfeaster]

You're not being discourteous, I'm just frustrated by having to constantly explain how paleography works! What you suggest is of course possible, but I don't think it is likely. The manuscript - with only a handful of identifiable "mistakes" and corrections - is more likely written by scribes who knew what they were doing.

That's a reasonable position to take.  Still, doesn't the following text look like it was written by someone who knew what they were doing?

   

It wasn't, or at least not fully, in spite of appearances.  This first issue of the Phonographic Star was published by the faculty and students of a school who were enthusiastic about Isaac Pitman's newly introduced "phonographic" shorthand but hadn't quite mastered it yet.  Some shortcomings involve the choice of symbols, while others involve how the symbols were formed: for example, some of the curves are too shallow to be distinguished clearly from straight lines.  The writing in later issues became more proficient on both counts.  But I know that mainly because I can read it, and because I know how phonography was "supposed" to work in early 1844.

Four hundred years separate this example from the VMS.  But I don't see why someone just learning to write Voynichese wouldn't have been likely to experience analogous difficulties if it was as novel and experimental a writing system in the early fifteenth century as Isaac Pitman's phonography was in the early 1840s.  So I guess I'm wondering whether some parts of the VMS might be comparable in proficiency to that first issue of the Phonographic Star, if it helps to have a concrete point of reference.