Single Leg Gallows

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I hope everyone agrees that the Author (who devised the script, chose or created the information in the book, etc.) did not write directly onto vellum.  Vellum was expensive (I have seen an estimate of US$1-2 per folio in today's money) and is a pain to erase.  He/she must have written a final draft on paper, and only then got it copied onto vellum.  

The author may have done this last "vellification" step him/herself, but I think there are good argments and evidence that he/she instead recruited some Scribe (or Scribes, if you will) to do it.  For one thing, that last step was boring and tiring work that he/she surely would rather pay someone to do.  Also, the characters of the VMS are very small; writing them requires a very sharp pen and a hand that is used to drive it -- an ability that not every scholar/doctor/whatever would have.  And there are many clear mistakes by the Scribe that suggest he/she probably did not understand the contents of the book or even the language.

I believe that the Author taught the Scribe the alphabet, had him/her practice copying text until the results were satisfactory, and then let him/her work mostly on hie/her own. The Author presumably dropped in now and then to check the results, resolve any doubts, and improve the instructions (like "You are wasting too much vellum, write more compactly.  And try to make the rs and ss more distinct").

Awareness of this process is important when studying questions like the meaning of p and f.   Because I believe that both the Author and the Scribe understood that, in running text (such as the bulk of Herbal, Biological, Pharma, and Starred Parags, excluding titles,labels, text rings, etc.) paragraph breaks were important, but line breaks were not.  The Scribe respected the parag breaks of the draft, but disregarded its line breaks, and put a line break in the clean copy whenever he/she reached the right margin.

The Author may have marked the parag breaks in the draft in any of several ways -- by wider line spacing, special marks like ¶ •  // , indenting the first line, etc.  But the Scribe choose to use the method that he/she routinely used in other Latin or vernacular documents, namely using taller and fancier capitals and ascenders on the first letter or the first line of each paragraph.

However, that was not immediately possible because the original Voynichese scriipt had no capital letters.  So I guess that the Author and Scribe agreed to mark the paragraphs by fancifying some of the gallows t and k (or common combinations like te and ke) that occurred on the top line of each parag into p and f (or vice-versa); a conversion which the Scribe did mostly on his/her own. 

On the other hand, I see evidence that the Scribe in some places failed to respect the parag breaks intended by the Author, and joined two or more of them into a single block of running text, with each parag starting on the same line that the previous one ended.  Or that the Scribe sometimes tried to save vellum by squeezing the text at the end of a parag so that it would end on the right margin (rather than end with a line of only one or two words); and then failed to leave extra space and use p/f on the first line of the next parag. Perhaps assuming that other clues would be sufficient, such as the stars in the Starred Parags section.

Whether or not the details of the process happened as suggested above, it is important to take these possibilities into account in any analysis of p/f use, or of word frequency differences at different positions within lines and parags.

All the best, --jorge