Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing

[pfeaster]

• 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.
  

In your account, it seems the Author would have gambled on himself being more likely to make mistakes while writing in Voynichese, in spite of being able to understand it, than a Scribe copying his proofread text afterwards without being able to understand it.  That might be a reasonable gamble under some circumstances, but it doesn't strike me as an obvious one to make.

• 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....  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.
  

Agreed that there's decent evidence that line breaks were introduced during physical inscription on vellum (and hence by the Scribe, if we're distinguishing roles).

• For the above reasons, it is unlikely that the encryption (if there was any) would have depended on line breaks.
  

I could imagine the "vellum-specificity" of the line breaks being used to support either of two contradictory conclusions:

1) Line patterns can't have been copied from a rough draft, so the relevant features of the script can't have played any significant role in encoding meaning -- in fact, they can't even have been an incidental byproduct of an encoding scheme.

2) Line patterns permeate the whole text so thoroughly that they can only have arisen, somehow, during the encoding process itself, and hence the encoding must have taken place simultaneously with the actual inscription on vellum.

For now, I'm going to skip over a few arguments I believe hinge on claims that the text of the Voynich Manuscript was too proficiently executed to be the work of anyone but trained professionals with stable, thoroughly developed Voynichese hands -- except to suggest that this is debatable.  Moving on:  

• 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. 
  

This is admittedly a puzzler.  To me, such evidence speaks against the Scribe being a trained professional.  But I'm not sure how much we can conclude from it about the Scribe's ability to understand the "code."  Would you agree that (in your account) the Scribe would minimally have needed to grasp the idea that text was to be copied from a source "rough draft" and written in linear fashion across the page with breaks inserted as necessary?  If so, a misalignment would seem to be a mistake in execution that was not due to a failure of understanding.  It would have to be something the Scribe got wrong even though they presumably knew better.  And if that's true in the one case, why not in the others?  I don't have an alternative explanation for this apparent sloppiness, but I don't think the Scribe's inability to understand the "code" could fully account for it.

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.

Only if the choices are in fact among functionally interchangeable equivalents.  One problem here is that if we decide that any grapheme with a distinctive positional distribution must be "equivalent" to one or more other graphemes with complementary positional distributions, we'd risk being left with -- I don't know -- maybe two or three truly contrastive graphemes?