Corrections in the VMS

[-JKP-]

I live in an area that wasn't colonized until 1853.

...tries to think... So that's Africa or Australia, right?

But we digress.

First off, I would suggest that there are several hands in the Voynich, if you look at the handwriting. This is not a novel or new argument.


But all of them share the same characteristics - firm shaping of the letters, flowing cursive script that runs glyphs together. We don't see constant stop starts in the middle of "vords", but instead they are formed by a hand who knows how to form the glyphs and which glyph is coming next.

Actually, Australia was colonized by Europeans almost a century before this area. It is relevant to research. Europeans and Asians grow up with millennia of history all around them. I grew up with trees. There are no old buildings or old books or people speaking other languages here. Aspects of history that many people learn as children because they are surrounded by it are completely unknown to those of us who grew up 6,000 miles away from the origin of the VMS, unless we make the effort to learn it.


As for other hands, it's a very interesting aspect of the VMS. I'm glad you brought up the topic. There's definitely more than one hand (not counting the marginalia and zodiac labels). There is one example in particular where the person who wrote in the letters didn't appear to comprehend the patterns and shapes of the VMS writing system. Since we're on the topic, I should upload the example to my blog. I'll try to dig up my notes.


To answer your question about the fluidity of the writing. The reason I suspect there was a "precopy" of some sort for at least some of the more complex pages (on the assumption that there is meaning behind the text) is because one can't always predict how much of a particular topic will fit on one page if writing extemporaneously. Yet most of the text-dense pages appear self-contained—they don't squeeze in extra text at the end or on the sides or bleed over to the next section (e.g., pages 75r to 85r) because there wasn't enough room.