28-09-2025, 12:44 AM
There is one interesting observation:
Both those annotations and the marginalia show ambiguous tokens that could either be latin letters or Voynichese glyphs - or a mix of both.
The marginalia even show the full spectrum from unambiguous letters to ambiguous intermediates to unambiguous Voynichese glyphs. Why?
While I am far from convinced by the retracing hypothesis, I struggle with an alternative explanation. A clever obfuscation? Or incompetence?
The color annotations look much more refined than the marginalia, especially 116v. If we assume the artist copied color annotations from a source image without understanding them, his writing even got worse later.
However, can we rule out these annotations were added later, after completion of the text but before painting? From the imagery I would assume that marginalia are contemporary with the rest of the imagery on the respective bifolios. But that does not have to be the case for the color annotations. Either these were made at a different time period or by a different person as the marginalia.
Both those annotations and the marginalia show ambiguous tokens that could either be latin letters or Voynichese glyphs - or a mix of both.
The marginalia even show the full spectrum from unambiguous letters to ambiguous intermediates to unambiguous Voynichese glyphs. Why?
While I am far from convinced by the retracing hypothesis, I struggle with an alternative explanation. A clever obfuscation? Or incompetence?
The color annotations look much more refined than the marginalia, especially 116v. If we assume the artist copied color annotations from a source image without understanding them, his writing even got worse later.
However, can we rule out these annotations were added later, after completion of the text but before painting? From the imagery I would assume that marginalia are contemporary with the rest of the imagery on the respective bifolios. But that does not have to be the case for the color annotations. Either these were made at a different time period or by a different person as the marginalia.