[Movie] Voynich Talk E3: Why your Voynich theory is wrong (pt2)

[Mark Knowles]

In my view, it is worthwhile to study rare characters as rare characters. This means looking at their context (when are they used, when not?)...

But one must be aware that many of those weirdos are just "accidents" where the Scribe intended to write one of the common characters but it came out malformed to the point of being unrecognizable.

And I will not even mention retracing, not at all.  (What the hell is that?)

All the best, --jorge

I think some are certainly accidents, but I think the argument needs to be advanced in every case. Clearly when a "weirdo" appears only in one place in the whole manuscript it may be, although not necessarily is, an accident. Where a glyph appears more than once in different places in the manuscript one should be wary of dismissing it as an accident unless one has a good argument for doing so. And one should certainly not dismiss characters that one recognises as geninue, purely on the basis that they occur rarely. If the author(s) chose to draw a glyph there is a reason for it and so it needs to be taken seriously. I think it is also a mistake to dismiss characters that typically, but not universally, appear in certain places. I think one has to be cautious in identifying certain "spaces" as spaces when sometimes this is not certain.