[Blog Post] The Pattern of the Wheel on 57v

[Yavernoxia]

(1) The Author of the manuscript (who invented the script, chose the book contents, composed the text, etc) is not the same person as the Scribe(s) who actually wrote the manuscript on the vellum.  It would be very stupid for anyone to write such a book directly from head to vellum.  The Author surely wrote the text on paper, edited it as needed on paper, and eventually gave a final draft to the Scribe(s).  The draft possibly included sketches of the illustrations, but the degree of detail in those sketches is uncertain, with the rest having been left to the Scribe(s) to provide.  The Author may even have just described some of the figures verbally to the Scribes.

This is an important detail because the Scribes must have had only very basic knowledge of Voynichese, namely the basic alphabet; and almost surely did not understand the meaning of the diagrams.  Thus they may have mis-read or mis-copied many glyphs, especially weirdos like those of f57v, and botched many details of the illustrations.  There is plenty of evidence of the latter in the Zodiac pages, for instance, where the Scribes left out a couple of stars and/or nymphs that should have been there.

I'm sorry to contradict someone as knowledgeable as you, Stolfi, but the parts highlighted in bold are speculation as far as I'm concerned. We cannot be certain that the author and the scribe(s) are different people; the author could very well be one of the scribes. As for the text, yes, it is surely likely that it was first written on paper and then copied onto vellum, but here too we have no certainty about this, so saying “must” seems exaggerated to me. But the most important thing of all is that to say that the scribe did not have a great knowledge of Voynechese is 100% impossible to know; in fact, I would say that statistically the opposite is more likely.

I would say that the differences between the four repetitions of the sequence are not intentional. The Scribe probably mangled those unfamiliar glyphs to some extent, and then the Retracer magnified the mangling.

The difference between the 3rd caracther in the first of the four circles seems significant to me. It's not a coincidence, on the whole text there's a clear difference between j and d.

Nothing has faded and nothing has been redrawn.
The ink simply behaves this way.

I agree.