Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing

[Jorge_Stolfi]

OK, let me state the premises and claims again:

Assumption: 

• The VMS is not a hoax.  It has meaningful contents and the Author wished that the information was accurately represented in it.
  

Claims (under that assumption):

1. The Scribe (the person who actually wrote on the vellum) was not the Author (the person who invented the script, chose the contents, composed the text, conceived the essential parts of the figures).
   
2. While writing, the Scribe had freedom to chose line breaks inside paragraphs, placement of paragraphs, placement of margins, etc. without regard for their semantic contents,  He also had the freedom to do some substitutions, such as use p/f instead of other letters in order to highlight the head line of each parag.  He also had some abbreviations that he could choose to use in order to avoid bad line breaks. He may have had a way to hyphenate words.
   
3. On the other hand, the Scribe did not have to do any thinking that was more complicated than what any scribe-for-hire would do -- such as estimate whether the next few words would fit in the current line, and decide whether to break a line and/or adjust the spacing of words accordingly.
   

These claims are supported by common sense and observable details in the manuscript:

• It would not be sensible to compose the text or do some complicated encryption algorithm while writing directly on vellum.  Errors would be unavoidable; they would be rather laborious to correct, and would leave messy traces.  Imagine realizing that a Choty should have been ChoCThy several lines after the fact.  Thus it is very likely that composition and eventual encryption were done on paper.
  
• The text in Herbal and Biological was obviously written after the figures were drawn, and the lines have different word counts because of the variable width of the plant.  On page 112r, after writing the first line the Scribe found that a broad area of the vellum adjacent to the East edge of the panel had some problem that interfered with the writing, and thus pulled the right rail of the text Westwards by a further 15 to 30 mm.   On the opposite page f112v, presumably for the same reason, he split the left rail into three (somewhat slanted) sections, at ~50, ~40, and ~30 mm from the West edge of the panel.   Because of these and other unexpected circumstances, it would be impossible for the Author to predict how many words would fit on each line, and thus where the line breaks would be.  Even for the Scribe it would be hard to predict the next line break in advance, before he got near the end of that line.
  
• For the above reasons, it is unlikely that the encryption (if there was any) would have depended on line breaks.
  
• But if the Scribe's work was limited to copying from the draft and other simple calligraphic decisions, then it would be a slow and tiresome but almost mechanical task.  Thus is likely that the Author would have rather paid a Starving Student or monk to do the job, rather than do it himself.
  
• Anyway, if there were indeed N > 1 distinct Scribes, at least N-1 of them would be different from the Author.
  
• Moreover, the letters of the VMS are very small and had to be drawn with a fine pen, by someone with a firm hand and nice handwriting. Not everybody who could write would have those qualifications.  Professional scribes and secretaries would.
  
• There are places in the VMS where the Scribe made obvious mistakes (like skipping stars in the Zodiac or Stars sections, or writing the two halves of a parag, separated by a plant stem, mis-aligned by one line) which would be natural for a Scribe who did not understand the "code", language, and contents, but seem unlikely for the Author himself. 
  
• If some or all of the Scribes were different from the Author, each would have to be trained to copy the script from the draft.  It would be already a minor hassle to teach him the alphabet and have him practice copying it until the result was satisfactory.  It would be a bigger hassle if the Author had to teach him also some complicated encryption method.  That makes it less likely that the Author would choose an encryption method that would require that step.  Generally speaking, methods that depended on line breaks would not have any advantage over methods did not.
  

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!

Yes, but those are the kind of decisions that a Scribe would be used to make when writing in Latin or some other common language.  

Even today, calligraphers and word processors are taught to avoid line breaks in certain bad positions.  Here are some rules for English that I found with some quick googling:

• The articles (a, an, the) are never followed by a line break.
  
• An adjective should stay together with what it is describing, but two or more adjectives can sometimes be separated with commas, and then it is possible (though not preferable) to break a line after one of the commas.
  
• Clauses should stay together (never break lines after relative pronouns like which, that, who, etc.).
  
• Prepositions are not followed by a line break if the break would separate them from the noun they refer to. A preposition in a concrete/physical meaning (e.g. "The book is in the drawer") always precedes a noun, and cannot be followed by a line break. However, in English, a preposition that is part of a phrasal verb (put up, figure out, take in) may sometimes not be followed by a noun ("I figured it out yesterday"), and so, it can be followed by a line break.
  
• Proper names should stay together if at all possible (think of them as a single word with many parts).
  
• "Do not carry over parts of abbreviations, dates, or numbers to the next line"
  
• "Do not break numbers at a decimal point, or separate them from their abbreviated units, as with 15 kg or 300 BC. 
  
• A widow is a very short line at the end of a paragraph.  Widows should be avoided because they look ugly and reduce readability.
  

Even if the VMS scribe could not understand the text, he may have been taught some simple rules like those, e.g. "never break between a qo and the next word" or "you can abbreviate iin as m if you need to" or "if you must break line in the middle of a long word, break preferably before a gallows and precede it with a single y to indicate that it is a continuation".  Rules like these could explain the anomalous statistics around line breaks.

And then the draft may have had four different kinds of spaces, namely inter-glyph spaces and short, medium, and long inter-word spaces.  The latter three could separate parts of compound words (as in "teapot"), separate full words, and separate sentences.  (Voynichologists seem to have agreed that there is only one kind of word space, but AFAIK this decision has never been explicitly questioned or justified.   Transcribers use "." for any space of any width that is clearly wider than inter-glyph, and use "," to mean "dubious word space" rather than "short word space".) In that case, the Scribe could then have been taught to break preferably at sentence-spaces and avoid breaking at compound-spaces.  

This sort of rule  too could have influenced the statistics around line breaks.  For instance, in English there should be an increased frequency of "The" in start-of-sentence, and of "-ed" in end-of-sentence.  And recently I found out that in the Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, and Ge'ez) it is common to start each sentence of a narrative with "And ..." (which must be why this "mistake" is common in the KJ Bible.)

All the best, --jorge