copy of an older, barely legible manuscript?

[JoJo_Jost]

The point is that, if your idea arose from an invalid translation, then the idea has no basis.

Certainly, it is possible that the text we have is a copy of a draft, or another original.
Certainly, it is also possible that errors were made during this copying. 
(Both things are known to have happened in other manuscripts.)

However, the evidence for it, or the places where it may have happened is not valid (if the translation is invalid).

For me, it is not even certain that the 'words' in the MS represent words.

Yes, that's a good point, of course. But how can you know that you have a truly “valid translation” until you have translated large parts of the text using a consistent “code” that is comprehensible and logical to everyone? And this is where the vicious circle begins.

For example, on one of the first pages of the Herbal section, I have the following sequence within a sentence:

duo folia ora foliis folia ora cum foliis

This is complete nonsense—the code is producing garbage. What does that tell me? Get rid of it and start over, especially given the frequency of such nonsensical passages in the text.

Then I had an idea, precisely with this sequence: Here, the writer has written a sequence in two variants.

Duo:  folia ora foliis
Duo:  folia ora cum foliis

These are still not particularly great sequences, but they are no longer garbage...

And that was the background to my question:  It was important for me to know whether it could actually be possible that such duplications could be an indication of different variants that were simply written one after the other  - and according to my research over the last few days, this has been common practice, but not in the quantity in which it appears in the Voynich Manuscript. So was a very difficult-to-read text copied down?


But I understand that it may not have been wise to ask this question in this way. It just bothered me. So I'll retreat back to my little working-chamber, take it as a working hypothesis, and hope that something meaningful remains in the end If so, I'll be sure to post it here. But I'm less and less convinced

PS: I don't believe that the words are words either...