Did the scribes copy the letters correctly?

[DorotheeM]

It seems to me highly unlikely that any such hired writer would be permitted by the hirer to write the manuscript and to do it unsupervised, to mangle it and make errors. Really? The hirer did not bother to check the work as it being done?

Marci's famous VMS letter was written by a secretary, because (IIUC) by that time his eyesight was so poor that he could not write letters himself.  (And he may have been already suffering from senility -- letters to Kircher from his friends, years later, say so much.)

If failing eyesight was one of the reasons for the Author recruiting a scribe, rather than doing the clean-copy himself, then perhaps he was also unable to check the result, and had to trust the Scribe.

At no time thought to tell him, "You are no good at this job. On your bike. I am getting someone else"?

Actually I suspect that he did so when the Scribe was  halfway through line f105r.13. 

Here is my most favored (most fun if not most likely) reconstruction of the relevant events.  After finishing the parag tail line f105.9 (...okchey), the Scribe started the next parag on what is now f105.11 (pdar oshedy ...).  He was halfway through that line when he noticed that he had skipped five words dairy ... ytam earlier in that same line.  So he wrote the rest of f105.11 a little lower than intended, to leave enough space above it; and wrote the skipped words in that space, creating what is conventionally called the "right-justifed title" f105.10.

The Scribe was almost finishing line f105.13 when -- oh no! -- the Author dropped in to check his work.  In spite of his bad eyesight, the Author noticed the mess the Scribe had done on line f105r.10, emphatically expressed some unwarranted conjectures about the his mother's occupation, and sent him "on his bike".   Leaving a half-word ot dangling on that last line.

The Author then recruited another Scribe and trained him on the Voynichese alphabet.  But this new Scribe did not notice that f105.13 was incomplete, so he started with the next parag, f105r.14 (kesoar qoeeedy...)

All the best, --stolfi

To quote one of my favorites: "Se non è vero, è ben trovato."  

Cheers, 

Doro