24-08-2025, 01:50 PM
Some loose reflections....
I believe a current mainstream view is that Voynich Manuscript was written by several scribes and Lisa Fagin Davis made some claims about it pointing out 5 different scribes or so.
While analysis of handwriting isn't my forte I also naively feel that the pages differ in style and were probably written by several people. Compare for example page f38v and page f39r:
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So let's assume there is one man writing with bigger letters and another man writing with smaller letters as it can be seen in the example.
The interesting observation is that the man who writes with small letters generates more text when describing plants. I haven't done any calculations but I feel it could be statistically proved with every page.
If they were just scribes and copying work of yet another man then there shouldn't be such result. If you tell some people to copy some existing herbal and assign randomly 10 pages to each guy then in theory, none of them should get regularly longer plant descriptions.
Unless they are actual authors of the written text and plants descriptions reflect their personal style. So the big letter guy is "lazy" and writes shorter passages and the small letter guy is hard-working and makes a lot of text.
But does it make sense? Several scribes are making a single herbal together and everybody writes what he wants? Not really for me
It would make more sense if the text was gibberish. Then several people could work on the same fake manuscript but have some degree of freedom. The rule would be - fill the page, don't make it look empty. So the small letter guy would need more text to do the job.
How do you think? Are they any explanations that some scribe regularly generates longer descriptions than the other one?
I believe a current mainstream view is that Voynich Manuscript was written by several scribes and Lisa Fagin Davis made some claims about it pointing out 5 different scribes or so.
While analysis of handwriting isn't my forte I also naively feel that the pages differ in style and were probably written by several people. Compare for example page f38v and page f39r:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
So let's assume there is one man writing with bigger letters and another man writing with smaller letters as it can be seen in the example.
The interesting observation is that the man who writes with small letters generates more text when describing plants. I haven't done any calculations but I feel it could be statistically proved with every page.
If they were just scribes and copying work of yet another man then there shouldn't be such result. If you tell some people to copy some existing herbal and assign randomly 10 pages to each guy then in theory, none of them should get regularly longer plant descriptions.
Unless they are actual authors of the written text and plants descriptions reflect their personal style. So the big letter guy is "lazy" and writes shorter passages and the small letter guy is hard-working and makes a lot of text.
But does it make sense? Several scribes are making a single herbal together and everybody writes what he wants? Not really for me
It would make more sense if the text was gibberish. Then several people could work on the same fake manuscript but have some degree of freedom. The rule would be - fill the page, don't make it look empty. So the small letter guy would need more text to do the job.
How do you think? Are they any explanations that some scribe regularly generates longer descriptions than the other one?
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