Opinions on: line as a functional unit

[qoltedy]

If the text is copied from an earlier script

Again, this was almost certainly the case.  Because of the care required, and the difficulty of correcting mistakes, it would be insane to write anything straight from brain to vellum.   We may assume that the Author wrote a draft on paper and then recruited a Scribe (or various Scribes) to clean-copy it to vellum.

for reasons unknown, they had a strong preference and ability to write 1 sentence per line

Indeed there are no convincing precedents or reasoning that would explain how every sentence of a paragraph, except the last one, could be fitted precisely between the left and right rails, with hardly any stretching or shrinking of all the characters.  

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And surely there are many more possible explanations, other than LAAFU, that we haven't thought of yet...

While I agree that the "copied from an earlier text" hypothesis is the easiest to imagine from our perspective, and ideas such as it being "insane" to write straight stream of consciousness to vellum, we are indeed dealing with quite an "insane" document historical artifact to begin with.

I agree that there are no convincing precedents for the "stream of consciousness, while perfectly writing every sentence  to fit the space" that we know of in historical writing. But again, the Voynich Manuscript has no precedent. It is completely unique in several ways. The script, the statistical patterns, the illustrations, all seem like something "probably impossible/no good reason for it". Very clearly the author was on a different wavelength than the rest of us, both their contemporaries at the time, and everyone since then.

I think there is "reasoning" for why the author may have been able to write like this, and why they decided to.

Going back to the constructed language hypothesis, if the author intentionally designed their system without punctuation, they may have naturally concluded that a line should act as a functional unit, making a sort of built-in sentence demarcation for each line. It would actually be quite an elegant solution to avoid creating sentence terminating characters, to make each line act as a functional sentence marker.

As for the "insanity" of going straight from thought to vellum, we have several strong pieces of evidence the scribe(s) drew the illustrations and wrote the text in the same sitting with the same pen. The drawings are generally quite crude and do quite frankly, for the most part, seem like they could have been made with no prior planning. This indicates it's still entirely possible, and supported by evidence, that they were writing the text quickly without much planning. While we may not entirely understand why they would be willing to draw/write in such a lax way on such an expensive medium, we can only speculate based on the evidence in front of us.

As for the "how", that is also a matter of speculation, but given all we know and don't know about the particular ways the text was generated, it may be possible that some aspect of the writing system allows for enhanced estimation of sentence length in real time writing. We wonder why someone would make up their own language/script instead of using any existing language or cipher. Perhaps because their system provided advantages, such as this enhanced line length estimation ability.

Obviously we're all speculating here, but I think this line of reasoning is both logically consistent and consistent with the evidence of what we observe in the manuscript. It's just very counterintuitive from the perspective of people who didn't write the manuscript.