• Options
• Login
• Desktop Style

Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

• Index

  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Provenance & history
  • Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material
• Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  ReneZ > 06-08-2025, 09:07 AM

  Nowadays, we enjoy this privilege within 60 minutes :-)

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  tavie > 06-08-2025, 09:59 AM

  The mistake where the scribes forgot to draw a nymph's arm doesn't seem to help the argument here, the opposite: it shows they were quite capable of making silly mistakes when they did know better.  
  
  It seems feasible to me that a scribe could make a silly mistake like 88r if they were focusing on getting the glyphs right especially if (depending on folio ordering and when the labels were written) they had just done a lot of labels.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  Jorge_Stolfi > 06-08-2025, 10:09 AM

  The above assumes (and supports) that the Scribe who wrote on vellum was not the Author who invented the script, composed the text, etc.
  
  All the best, --jorge

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  Yavernoxia > 06-08-2025, 10:59 AM

  (06-08-2025, 10:09 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The above assumes (and supports) that the Scribe who wrote on vellum was not the Author who invented the script, composed the text, etc.
  
  All the best, --jorge

  It does not. It just implies that the labels where written all together before/after the rest of the page and illustrations.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  Antonio García Jiménez > 06-08-2025, 11:40 AM

  There may be another explanation for all this. It's simply that placing a label incorrectly or not placing one at all isn't important because labels don't provide any information; they're just a way to complement the images.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  dashstofsk > 06-08-2025, 02:18 PM

  (06-08-2025, 11:40 AM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.isn't important because labels don't provide any information

  
  This is very much the way I see things also. But then again I am firmly in the hoax / meaningless text / artificial fabrication camp. The author sometimes likes to fill a space with a word just because there is a space to be filled. The f88 pages do indeed look unnecessarily overcrowded. You see this in other places also. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was it really necessary to squeeze all those small words around the fork of the plant stems? Could the text really not have been written so that it did not conflict with the illustrations? It just seems to be a personal style of the author.
  
  Whether he choses to include a label or not is just his preference also.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  Antonio García Jiménez > 06-08-2025, 03:22 PM

  I think it is useful in this regard to quote this observation made by Currier:
  
  Symbol groups at the ends of lines are frequently of a character unlike those appearing in the body of the text sometimes having the appearance of fillers.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  Jorge_Stolfi > 06-08-2025, 03:55 PM

  (06-08-2025, 03:22 PM)Antonio García Jiménez Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think it is useful in this regard to quote this observation made by Currier:
  
  Symbol groups at the ends of lines are frequently of a character unlike those appearing in the body of the text sometimes having the appearance of fillers.

  
  Has anyone checked whether this anomaly occurs on other (non-hoax, non-encrypted) manuscripts?
  
  That anomaly is not unexpected.   A Scribe copying running text would be more likely to abbreviate a word if it would otherwise stick out of the right margin, or if breaking the line before it would leave a dent in that margin or create a parag-final line with only one word.  Also, there may be some hyphenation scheme going on, with non-obvious conventions for marking it.
  
  It is also possible that sentences within a paragraph were marked in the original draft, e.g. with extra-wide word spaces.  Then the Scribe may have tried to get the line breaks to fall on sentence boundaries when possible, again by abbreviating words near the end of the line.

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  RobGea > 06-08-2025, 04:38 PM

  Never mind

• RE: Why I think that the copyist(s)/scribe(s) did not fully understand the material

  quimqu > 06-08-2025, 04:52 PM

  I'm intrigued by the notion that the scribe working on the Voynich Manuscript might have been unsupervised. Given the manuscript’s importance—especially as it is ciphered—you’d expect any errors introduced would be caught and corrected, perhaps by a supervisor or reviser. Yet, as some of you suggest, a few copying errors appear to have survived in the final version, which seems inconsistent with an oversight process.
  
  Is it then possible that the manuscript was completed under circumstances where supervision wasn’t feasible—or simply didn’t occur? And if so, what implications might that have for dating and contextualizing the production process? If supervision had been in place, you’d think at least minor errors would have been subsanated—but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
• Next Oldest Next Newest