Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing

[pfeaster]

My hope was that differences in ink darkness in the VMs could be used to gain insight into when a scribe paused during writing, since that could have implications for an encoding method.

This is unlikely, because the "encoding" (whatever that meant) was almost certainly done on paper.  It would be stupid to compose a complicated text directly on vellum.  Therefore the Scribe almost certainly was not 'encoding" as he wrote but merely clean-copying from an already "encoded" draft.

I acknowledge and understand this argument -- but I don't necessarily agree with it.  Here's one line of counterargument for your consideration.  During your remarks on Voynich Manuscript Day, I believe you put forward the following hypotheses as secure enough to approach "consensus" territory (apologies if I'm mischaracterizing any of them):

(1) The scribe was *not* encoding in the sense of choosing / determining the sequence of graphemes (which were simply being copied).
(2) The scribe *was* responsible for inserting line breaks (to fit available space).
(3) If both #1 and #2 are correct, then any line-specific patterning must be epiphenomenal, and can't reflect anything meaningful about the encoding process -- because encoding would necessarily have taken place before the current division into lines, and in isolation from it.

But wouldn't it be just as reasonable to hypothesize that if line breaks were imposed at the time the text was being written onto the vellum we have today, then the encoding must have taken place at that same time, and not beforehand, to produce the patterns we now see?

Unless, I suppose, the scribe were adapting already-encoded text at the time of copying according to processes so transformative as to count as an additional encoding step.  For example, building on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the scribe would minimally need to be responsible for the alternation between gallows-glyph types.  And also the choice of [m] and [g] at line end.  And also every distinction laid out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (alternation of [o] and [qo], [o] and [a], [k] and [t], etc.).  That's a lot!  If we remove all these distinctions from a hypothetical rough draft on paper with line breaks in different places, there wouldn't be much left of Voynichese.  Indeed, it seems to me that a hypothetical paper draft might as well have been written conventionally in Latin or German or Italian at that point.

For example, if the writer consistently wrote [chor] as [cho] (pause) [r], or [char] as [ch] (pause) [ar], that could potentially reveal something about the meaningful units or building-blocks of Voynichese.

But often the anomalously heavier strokes, that could be places where the Scribe went back and corrected or reinforced what he had already written, are often just part of a glyph.  So those interruptions do not seem to occur at semantically significant boundaries.  It is as if the text, for the Scribe, was just a bunch of strokes -- not even a bunch of glyphs...

I'm not sure we have enough knowledge of what counts as a "semantically significant boundary" (or of a grapheme, for that matter) to judge this.

But I also think my initial thoughts were pretty naive from the standpoint of mechanics of ink and penstrokes, so I'm not sure there's as much to be gained from this line of inquiry as I'd hoped.