Bad news: f116v was substantially mangled by Retracer

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Is there any practical difference between the retracing hypothesis and the idea that the manuscript is an imperfect copy made by someone who didn't know the original language or script, hence full of mistakes?

You mean, in terms of impact on our investigations?  I think the second hypothesis would be worse.  

In both cases, the Retracer or Copyist can misread a glyph and change it into another glyph, even if it is against the rules of the language or makes no sense; or change a glyph into an invalid weirdo.  Like the s turned into o, and the Sh turned into >blip<, of my earlier "pareidolia quiz" post.

But a Copyist may also skip glyphs and words, or duplicate words and phrases.  Seems that paleographers have many name for these -- "homeoteleuton", "homeoarchy", "parablepsis", "dittography", ... Errors which the Retracer cannot make.

And a Copyist can also confuse word and character spaces. (The expression "busillis" once was popular as a term for a problem that leaves all experts baffled.  The story goes that a Latin student came across the term in a book and no Latin or history experts he consulted knew what it meant. It turned out that what he had read as "in die busillis" = "on the day of the busillis" was in fact "in diebus illis" = "in those days"...)

All the best, --jorge