Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations

[Jorge_Stolfi]

“on internal evidence that the Scribe(s) knew the alphabet but could not read the contents” how you can make such a judgment not knowing what the text is saying.

One bit of evidence is page f34r, where the parts of lines 4-9 on the right side of the plant are not aligned with the parts on the left side. 

It looks like the Scribe copied all the left sides first, then all the right sides, as if that part of the text was in two-column layout.  But everywhere else the text clearly runs across plants from margin to margin, in a single column.  

It is possible that on that page, in particular, the text was indeed to be written in two-column layout. Or, it is possible that the Scribe did write whole line by whole line, but was so sloppy that, after line 4  got out of alignment, he doubled on the mistake and made it worse on each line, instead of trying to correct it.

But it seems that the most likely explanation is that the Scribe could not understand the text, and thus mistakenly assumed that the left half and the right half were a case of two-column layout.

There are also many words that occur only once and have a different structure from the vast majority of words.  Like q not followed by o, or words with two gallows that look like two words run together.  It is possible that those words are indeed what the Author wanted to write.  But an explanation that seems more likely is that the Scribe did not know the language, and thus did not notice when he skipped a letter, switched letters, inserted or omitted bogus spaces... 

I know the Greek alphabet, but I don't know a word of Greek, not even the basics like 'to be" and prepositions.  Thus I could copy a Greek text about as easily as I would copy an English one.  But I would make mistakes like the ones above, and would not notice...

All the best, --stolfi