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

[oshfdk]

Admitted, my "must" in that post is like in "the Egyptians must have drawn detailed plans of the Pyramids on paper before they started building them".  It does not mean "it is a fact that", but rather "it is highly likely based on logic and common sense".

And "surely" in English, bizarrely, means the same thing, or even worse.  "The package surely has been shipped" is a somewhat less reassuring message than "the package must have been shipped", which is a lot less reassuring than "the package was shipped".

Whether you believe that Voynichese is an exotic or invented language, a complicated cipher, or an elaborate hoax, it is very unlikely that five European scribes would understand the text; much less the illustrations.  So at least N-1 of the N scribes "must" have been just copying what they saw as a mere string of symbols and weird diagrams.  Like I would do if I had to copy a Greek manuscript: I know the alphabet, but would not understand anything of the text, not even the most basic words.  And thus I would not even notice if I write a nu instead of an upsilon, or a xi instead of a zeta; or if I skip a iota, or join two words that were meant to be separate, or split what was meant to be a single word... 

Apart from that, there are several clues in the VMS that the  Scribe did not understand what he or she was writing, whether in text or diagrams.    Like the mis-aligned text in two columns on f34r, or the missing nymphs and stars in some Zodiac pages.  For instance, here is a description of page f72r2 (Gemini) that I wrote years ago:

People would routinely misalign and misplace details when drawing charts and tables of their own design. When creating the images in my previous post I misplaced the strokes overlay and it ended up on the wrong layer and I had to redo the whole thing. If it was on vellum and 3/4 of the bifolio already done, maybe I would just add a comment to the effect of "the above should be in the right column" and leave it as it was.

There are a lot of weird glyphs in the manuscript, but to me they look more like attempts of adapting an existing glyph to a new situation, which implies not only knowledge, but design/ownership relationship to the script.

I agree that before putting the whole thing on vellum there likely had been initial drafts and sketches. But, given I treat the MS as a cipher and hence the circumstances of its creation dictated some secrecy, I don't think involving external scribes would be reasonable for the authors. I still think it's likely the author(s) and the scribe(s) are the same.