(3 hours ago)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In Russian. Use a translator.
I hacked at the Voynich Mauscript for several years around 2000, then kept away and joined this forum only last year. So I missed most of your posts. Thanks for creating that combined summary!
However it is a lot of stuff to take in all at once. On a quick reading, I see some observations that seem novel, and some that seem old. Some interpretations that I agree with, some that are intriguing, some that I think are misguided because of wrong assumptions.
In particular, I believe that all analyses of the drawings and writing that focus on small details, such as handwriting, are misguided because they ignore the extensive retouching that the book has suffered long after it was created. There is plenty of evidence for this retouching on every page -- but one will not see that evidence if one
starts with the tacit assumption that all the ink we see is original (the "Pristine Ink" theory).
Another misleading initial assumption that many have been making is that the person who put the quill to vellum was the Author himself (the "Author was the Scribe" theory). And some even assume that he composed the text as he was writing it, without writing a draft on paper first (the "Brain to Vellum" theory) Many interpretations become untenable if (as is most likely) the Scribe and the Author were distinct persons (the "Scribe not Author" theory), and the Scribe was only copying from the Author's draft without understanding the text (the "Ignorant Scribe" theory)
The details of the shape of each glyph, such as the position and shape of the plume on
Sh, are indeed all over the place. However, in order to claim that those differences are significant (the "Steganographic Code" theory), one would have to show that they are discrete: that for each glyph there is a small set of clearly distinct ideal "sub-glyphs", such that the actual shapes of that glyph cluster around those ideal shapes, with relatively few intermediate/ambiguous forms. Is that the case? My impression (visual only, not actually measured) is that the shapes of each glyph form a continuum with no obvious clusters. If there are indeed multiple ideal sub-glyphs of Sh, they must be so many, and so close together, that they cannot possibly be distinct letters. For one thing, the obvious sloppiness of the Scribe would get them all mixed up.
All the best, --stolfi