copy of an older, barely legible manuscript?

[oshfdk]

Something like this can ruin many serious attempts of decryption. Imagine if sequences were simply repeated in many lines, in a slightly different form. If you don't know that, it ruins a lot of meaningful attempts... that's what this thread is about.

I'm not sure what you would like to discuss. Is it possible that the scribe would repeat unclear parts of text? Yes, why not. I can't see any specific evidence of this, but I'm not sure what it should look like either. Nowadays alternative readings would be usually put in parentheses. I think it would have made sense for the scribe to highlight them somehow, write over/under an unclear word, etc.

General problem of an unreliable source or errors introduced in transcribing/retracing the original can lead to problems with deciphering, but this is not new. This is the reason I'm so attentive to Jorge Stolfi's retracing and multiple actors hypotheses, if true, they can affect decoding attempts. I'm not sure repeating some patterns several times with minor variations would be a huge problem, but this depends on how the cipher works.