[Movie] This Famous Medieval Book May Be a Hoax

[Torsten]

Sorry, but I’m not sure how your statement explains the specific situation in the Voynich Manuscript, where the line itself behaves as a functional unit, with both line-start and line-end patterns being consistently observable.

"line starts and line end patterns are clearly observable" does not imply "lines are functional units".  This is an hypothesis that needs good additional evidence to become likely.

If the line is a "functional unit", how do you explain that most of those "functional units" happen to have the right number of glyphs to precisely span the width of the text?  And why is the last "functional unit" of a page almost always shorter, ending at some random point between the text rails  (and, in some sections, it is the only "functional unit" that is like that)?

The term "Functional Entity" just describes a set of observations. It does not imply that "lines are functional units". See Currier 1976: "In addition to my findings about languages and hands, there are two other points that I d like to touch on very briefly. Neither of these has, I think, been discussed by anyone else before. The first point is that the line is a functional entity in the manuscript on all those pages where the text is presented linearly. There are three things about the lines that make me believe the line itself is a functional unit. The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines are markedly different from the counts of the same characters internally. There are, for instance, some characters that may not occur initially in a line. ... The ends of the lines contain what seem to be, in many cases, meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don t occur anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the line to the margin. Although this isn t always true, it frequently happens." [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 1976].

Anyway, the discussion is about whether the text was generated during writing — and that’s exactly my point. If, as you argue, medieval scribes routinely disregarded original line breaks or inserted their own purely for layout reasons, how do you explain the systematic, consistent patterns we see at both the beginnings and ends of lines in the Voynich Manuscript?

On page f112r, after writing the first "functional unit" at full width, the Scribe apparently noticed that there was something wrong with he vellum in that area (perhaps oily, or too absorbent, or too rough, or whatever) and thus reduced the text width by ~30% for "functional units" 2 to 20, and returned to normal width after that.  Was that layout planned by the Author, too?

On page f112v, the same vellum problem apparently caused the Scribe to indent "functional units" 1-10 by ~3 cm, then exdent "functional unit" 11 by ~1 cm, and continue to the end of the page with a left rail that was quite a bit slanted away from vertical; while the right rail was all straight and vertical. Semantically significant too?

At the top of folio f112, there’s a visible wrinkle in the parchment. The most practical way to avoid that wrinkle while writing the first two lines on the back (f112v) was to begin exactly where lines f112v.P.1 and f112v.P.2 actually start. The shorter line length at the beginning of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. isn’t a sign that the scribe was running out of space — it simply reflects an adjustment to the irregular surface. We see a similar pattern on folios You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f115v, where the starting point for writing shifts to the right, again likely in response to the parchment's condition. Even the hole in folio f107 caused no noticeable space issues.

One plausible explanation for all of this is that the scribe had the flexibility to choose glyph groups that neatly fit into the available space as they wrote. To me, also examples like on f112 strongly suggest that the text was being generated during the writing process, not copied mechanically from a fixed draft.