[Article] Voynich Paleography article

[LisaFaginDavis]

The main thing to always keep in mind is that scribes are humans. They have tendencies, not absolutes. There are always going to be exceptions, because humans are not robots, and even professional calligraphers aren't always going to be perfectly consistent. 

I chose those two glyphs because they stood out as having useful details. I considered other glyphs like V101-[p], but in the end decided to focus on those two for this preloiminary study.

[Torsten]

I had hoped that it would be possible to reenact your results.

I wonder if you would be so kind to answer some additional questions.

What did you mean with "linguistically identifiable roots, prefixes, and suffixes"?
(Montemurro & Zanette use the terms prefixes and suffixes to describe morphological patterns shared by related words. They even point to "scripts where the graphical form of words directly derives from their meaning." [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.])

What did you mean with "repeating orthographic ... patterns"? Can you give an example?

What did you mean with "repeating ... grammatical patterns"? Can you give an example?

[Aga Tentakulus]

@Lisa
I would be interested in your opinion about the page f73r, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (zodiac sign).
I have looked at the writing between the light and dark ink. I think it is the same person, because in the signs you can see the same swing. Taking into account the badly running ink and the tip of the pen.

[RenegadeHealer]

@LisaFaginDavis, I like your writing style a lot, no pun intended.

Looking at Table 1, I noticed that noteworthy folios 57 and 66 are one bifolio, written by two different scribes. If Scribe 1 wrote the famously rare-character-dense roundel of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. first, then Scribe 5 would have composed the indices / "key-like sequence" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. right in front of him. Or vice-versa, if Scribe 5 wrote first. This makes me want to revisit possible correspondences between the sequences of glyphs (and vords) on both pages. For example, it's probably coincidental, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has 34 characters in its key-like sequence, while the second-outermost ring of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has a sequence of 17 characters, repeated 4 times. (17 x 2 = 34). I find it interesting too, that there appears to be a paragraph break after the first 17 characters and their corresponding lines of text on f66r. It's only from that point down that each character does not line up neatly with a specific line, leaving a total of 32 lines of text, despite 34 index glyphs. Again, I'm probably seeing what I want to see, or at the very most, seeing what the authors of the VMs want to mislead me into seeing. But I thought I'd point it out; 17 is not a number I frequently encounter.

[RobGea]

Thanks Dr. Davis, great article.
Propz also to Project Muse for making the article open access.

[Koen G]

Let us keep this thread about the contents of the article. For the interesting discussion about the implications of multiple scribes, see here:
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[R. Sale]

In the VMs illustrations, the obfuscation is already built in. In the cosmos the appearance is visually altered. And in White Aries there clearly are two different ways to interpret the orientation of the blue-striped patterns according to heraldic traditions. The papellony patterns are clearly preset to foreshadow their blue-striped correspondents. The papelony pun cannot be made without the recognition of specific historical events and the recovery of traditional terminology and definitions, a built-in structure, and the capacity for heraldic canting. The VMs artist embodies this information, rather than just tacking it on as an after-thought. 

It's not added on, it's built in. Assuming the VMs is an authentic, historical document. It's more difficult to fake authenticity, so I'm told, but when has that ever stopped a determined forger?

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What are the determining factors to differentiate between similar hand-writing by multiple persons and the altered, aged, injured, writing of a single person over time? What is the 'degree of certainty' with which that proposed determination is made?

[Anton]

Lisa says above that she does not consider these as differences with age.

Purposeful alteration is an interesting idea, never thought of it. But I think it's where the Ockham's razor comes in. What for would one try to create the impression of the book that noone can read having been written by several scribes instead of just one? Surely not to entertain paleographers of future centuries?

[-JKP-]

One of the skills scribes had to learn was to mimic the handwriting of other people working on a manuscript. This was so the result was not full of jarring handwriting changes. To get it done on time (many were commissioned by patrons), they sometimes had several scribes working on different sections. The same with illuminators.

The mimicry was not perfect, you can usually still make out the handwriting, but the more professional ones did a good job of copying the same letterforms. What I have noticed, however, is that there is almost always a letter or two that is done in an individual way even when it is very consistent.

[R. Sale]

But the VMs seems unlikely to have been a 'commissioned' work, so why would there be specific deadlines for completion? I see the VMs as being more towards the other side of the spectrum.