(23-06-2025, 10:47 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As Currier pointed out back in 1976, “The ends of the lines contain what seem to be, in many cases, meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don’t occur anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the line to the margin.” That alone suggests the text wasn’t neatly prepared in advance and then simply copied onto the vellum — instead, it looks like the layout was adjusted on the fly.
I believe the Scribe and the Author agreed that, in running text, the
line breaks were not significant, only paragraph breaks. Thus the Scribe did how he was used to do when "vellifying" non-Voynichese text: he disregarded the line breaks in the draft, and added his own line breaks whenever he reached the right "rail" (text margin).
If he was a minimally experienced scribe, he would have tried to keep the lines right-justified, and to avoid wasting vellum with final parag lines with only one or two words. The tricks he could use achieve these goals included squeezing and stretching the writing when getting near the right rail, and using abbreviations when that was not enough. The Author would have had to teach him a set of suitable abbreviations and how to use them, "these words can be replaced by just
ar, these by o
l" etc.
Maybe sentence boundaries within a parag were marked in the draft somehow, and the Scribe tried to make his line breaks occur at those places if possible.
Quote:Another example of ambiguity can be seen on folio 105r, specifically in lines 9a and 10. While writing line 10, the scribe left a noticeably larger gap. It appears that the scribe wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the layout turned out. To make the gap less obvious, he used larger gallow glyphs and filled the remaining space between them with additional glyph groups.
My preferred theory for that example is that the Scribe skipped those words by mistake when he did the "carriage return" from line 10 to line 11, and noticed the mistake only after he had already started to write line 11. So the only fix he could think of was to write those skipped words in the space
above line 10, squeezing them between the gallows that were already there.
(And I had fun imagining that, a few minutes later, the Author checked on the Scribe's work, saw that blotch, said some unkind things about his mother, and fired him, when he had written only the first two glyphs of
otchedy on line 12. Then the Author hired a new Scribe who resumed from line 13. Which explains the sudden change of handwriting at that point.
But nah, i suppose it is a good story, but I really cannot see any real change of handwriting at that point. I see only that the Scribe got a new batch of ink, sharpened his pen, and proceeded to write more compactly in order to save vellum...)
All the best, --jorge