[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

[Continuing the discussion here from the "Was The Paint Later" thread. [Why is this thread filed under Voynich Research->Voynich Talk?]]

Not "few" [examples of different strokes are overwritten on one another], but hundreds.  Name any page.

I'm only aware of two occasions at the beginning of a line.

I have posted many other examples on this thread.  Again, name any page, I bet I can find some evidence that can't be easily explained in some other way. 

But there are many cases where these explanations don't work.  Like when the retraced glyph is clearly a misreading of the original.

This argument would totally work if you somehow produced the original of the Voynich Manuscript, in its unretraced glory, to compare to. Up until then it's just an interpretation of which glyphs are "good" and which ones are "bad", and our interpretations of this clearly differ.

But there are examples where the good glyph can be discerned from under a retraced hapax weirdo.  Like (D) on the clip from f1v below    
That glyph as it stands is not only a weirdo, but it uses a "reverse plume" stroke that does not seem to be used anywhere else.  

You may say that the Author/Scribe intended to use that glyph for "unknown reasons".  My explanation is that the glyph was originally an ordinary Sh, but an insect scraped a furrow between the two es (you can barely see it as a rougher texture on the blank vellum), erasing the right half of the plume.  The Retracer saw the remaining half-plume floating on the air, and since its left endpoint was close to the first e, he assumed that it was connected there, and "restored" it as such, extending the ligature of the Ch to the left to meet the "fixed" plume.  This "restoration" (B) is in visibly darker ink.

The (I) cese is similar.  The o with a detached plume must be very rare, if not unique.  My reading is that the original glyph was an s, but an insect ate away the right half of the plume and a bit of the e body.  The Retracer apparently did not see the plume, and restored what remained of the body as an o.

There are many other examples like that.  Again, name a page. I bet that there will be several hints of retracing, and possibly other examples like that one.

The "explanations" for me are only as good as they are able to advance us on our way of achieving this. The explanation that maybe a considerable portion of the manuscript are some doodles and scribbles unrelated to the original text is not helping here

But, if confirmed, the MRT would help a lot!  It would let us ignore many baffling details (like the crowns and the robot tentacle) as spurious late interventions, and conversely let us consider readings and theories that we can't consider if we assume that All Ink Is Original (and, worse, All Ink is Intentional). 

All the best, --stolfi