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How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

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• How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

• RE: How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

  dexdex > 1 hour ago

  (1 hour ago)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It may be possible to separate implausible from plausible, but I think that's about it without some additional data.

  
  Sure, but that's something, no?

• RE: How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

  Jorge_Stolfi > 28 minutes ago

  (2 hours ago)dexdex Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One thing I would say is one can probably arrange these options in a sequence of slowest to fastest. My personal ranking would be:  enciphered text > faithful copy >  sloppy copy > meaningless gibberish

  
  But it is very unlikely that the Author would have applied the encryption "on the fly", while he was writing it to vellum.  Iron gall ink on vellum is hard to erase, and not every one would have the steady hand necessary to write those small letters.  If the text is encrypted, the Author must have produced the encrypted text as a draft, and then he would probably have given the draft to a Scribe to copy on vellum.
  
  So while "enciphered" would take the most total time, the Scribe's part would be the same as for "faithful copy".
  
  The same goes for the "gibberish" option.  The gibberish generation methods that have been proposed are all quite complicated and laborious, because they must reproduce the peculiar statistics of Voynichese.  In fact, it would have taken a lot more effort to produce gibberish that way than by, say, writing every other word of the Acts of the Apostles in Mingrelian, with an invented alphabet, and with each word reversed back-to-front. (And that is one reason why I don't believe in the gibberish theory.)  
  
  Anyway, in this option too the Author would have produced a draft and given it to a Scribe to copy.  Only that here the Author would not care if the Scribe was sloppy and made many errors.
  
  Note also that, if the text is not gibberish, and is not a copy of some pre-existing book, learning and organizing the contents must have taken several orders of magnitude more work than writing it down.
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: How fast could a scribe write a Voynich like text?

  dexdex > 19 minutes ago

  The methods devised by participants of g&b experiment can match Voynichese quite well (and seemingly better than any proposed languages), while not appearing to require more than simply writing words on a page. This is all in their article so I'm not sure what you mean about the gibberish generation being laborious.
  
  You're correct that the act of copying an enciphered text would be like the copy scenario, so I supposeI am also thinking about the 'total time' to create. Any process requires putting words down on the page, so that provides a lower bound for anything, but a faithful copy further adds more time. So does any encipherment or actual information content.
  
  All of course presupposes that the author and the scribe(s) are the same; if the scribes just copied then the difference is only if they did it sloppily or well. But copying a text you don't understand is already a bit of a weird proposition that I personally weigh much less than that the authors and scribes are the same. You may disagree, but it is still an interesting thing to think about under the assumption.
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