(03-09-2025, 12:08 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(02-09-2025, 03:22 AM)anyasophira wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. What makes this plant so obvious that it only needs those 3 words.
It is a mistake to assume that the VMS is "perfect", like a copy of the Quran or a Torah scroll -- with every letter and stroke precisely as it should be. Any research that makes that assumption will get hopelessly snagged at every little inconsistency.
To me it is obvious that the text we see today is the result of many steps, before and after the initial writing on the parchment, that were either unintended or executed with varying amounts of care and skill -- and thus introduced an unknown amount of errors. From spelling mistakes to skipping, transposing, or mangling entire paragraphs (like the two halves of f34r parag 1).
The multi-language texts I have been using for comparative statistical analysis were all written by literate authors and revised by printers, and thus are essentially free of errors. (And I even corrected a few that had managed to sneak through. I collected my Certificate of Extreme Asperger after I corrected some errors in the Quran. In Arabic. Even without knowing a hummus serving of the language.)
However, I recently got hold of the diary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that explored the Western US around 1800. It is a very important historical manuscript -- by mostly by two authors, with a couple entries by others. It is in modern English, not encrypted. But it was written by brave Soldiers, not scholars; and thus it has about one spelling error or idiosyncratic abbreviation every line, or thereabouts. Especially when the authors try to render phrases and names in French, Spanish, and the languages of many dozens of Native tribes that they interacted with along the way. And the errors are not consistent, of course: the word "buffalo" is spelled in at least four or five different ways. Even in the same paragraph...
The point is that we must always keep in mind the possibility that the Voynich manuscript has as many errors and inconsistent spellings as the Lewis and Clark one, or even more.
All the best, --jorge
Thank you for taking the time to respond Jorge. I was so honored you even glanced at this ( so many amazing researchers on this forum!). That is a very good point. I am curious since I have limited exposure to historical ciphers or script meant to be encoded- when those were decoded did they also show a lot of natural errors made by the scribes? Meaning the solution is known and the text clearly has a misprint and therefore is translated into an error? I did try to think about large trends found from data and studies on the manuscript when looking at these three vords. So what makes them unique could just be a typical error- they were meant to have an o or an n instead of m. It is still interesting to me what makes them “not unique” to other initial lines in the text. You have studied the script so much you probably know how it acts intuitively at this point- do you feel that there is a difference in how labels behave to lines? or iare the patterns very similar with both of these types?