[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections

[Torsten]

I cannot push aside the idea that the Author was old and poor and with failing eyesight when he decided to put his notes to vellum.  And that the Scribe may have been a bright 13-year-old nephew who agreed to do his uncle this favor for a pittance.  And thus the old man had to accept all the errors that the boy made.  And probably not even the Author himself could read his own handwriting of 30 years earlier...

All the best, --stolfi

This argumentation is problematic for several reasons. First, it is circular reasoning to assume that we can detect exceptions for rules we still want to discover. Secondly, by using this hypothesis we would start the analysis with the presumption that we can't trust our observations.

Last but not least the hypothesis doesn't fit with well known facts:

1) The VMS doesn't contain any corrections in form of deleted glyphs. If there are misspelled glyphs the scribe didn't care to scrape them out. This clearly contradicts the idea that we can determine errors. In my eyes the idea that the text was copied from a draft and that the scribe didn't understand what he was writing illustrates, how a problematic starting hypothesis leads to even more problematic conclusions.

2) Words with high mutual similarity are typical for the VMS. For each common word there is at least another one differing from it by only a single quill stroke. For example, in addition to the word <daiin> also the words <dain> and <daiiin> are present in the text. The existence of words with high mutual similarity to other words is quite normal for the VMS. To explain them as errors is therefore more than problematic.

3) The shift from Currier A to Currier B demonstrates that the VMS has an evolving vocabulary with no stable baseline. There's no "correct" form of the text against which errors can be measured — because the text is a process, not a product. You can't have errors in a system that has no fixed target.

4) The text perfectly fits into the available space. This is even the case for holes within the parchment or if a drawing of a plant separates a line into multiple parts. This indicates that the text layout responds to the layout of the page. Either, the text layout was made during writing or in addition to the holes, the text layout was copied. Therefore, this observation indicates that the text was adapted during writing and also that the scribe was the author.
An alternative idea would be that the VMS is a facsimile of the original manuscript. But this would mean that besides the text layout, the "errors" were copied.