VMs: Nick's Strokes [was: thoughts etc]

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Noted;
> - and I find
> it even harder to imagine a faker using a barely-writable character set
> (AIUI, each glyph can take up to 6 or 7 strokes to form) for a 200+ page
> hoax, let alone one with so many layers of structure.

Barbara Babbles;
I was saving this for the planned website but I can't let this go by; I've
just *got* to challenge it on two levels (and I'm sure our on-list expert,
Maurizio, will correct me where and if I'm in error - our differences so far
seem only to be that I use less technical language than he <g>).

Firstly;
Medieval Book-Hand could require (for example some Black Letter Hands) as
many as 6 strokes just to write the letter "i" (and that's a body text "i",
not a decorative initial). Therefore if the vms characters required several
strokes to write them it would not be "barley writable" but would be
consistent with Book-Hands of the medieval era - which would both be
"natural" to a medieval author and essential to a "modern" hoaxer.

Secondly,
As I've said in another post I'm reconstructing from a very high quality
4-colour print repo which shows pen lifts and stops quite clearly. Were such
a high number of strokes used to write voynich characters they'd be clearly
visible: they are not.

The Vms isn't in Book-Hand, but *Document-Hand* (the best, but far from
exact, modern comparisons would be the difference between calligraphy and
handwriting). What stroke analysis I've seen so far have (in my opinion)
erroneously tried to reconstruct the vms alphabet using calligraphic flat
steel-nib techniques; however using document-hand and quill pen techniques
the stroke count is considerably reduced.

Ignoring ligatures (eg cph), composites (eg iiim etc), and figures with
diacritics; and defining a stroke as from pen-down to pen-lift (stops for
changing direction considered to be within the stroke); the basic units of
the voynich characters can be reconstructed in Document-Hand as follows;

1 stroke; i o e d
2 stroke; a b r n s q y ch m z g* j*
3 stroke; x sh**

*g and j are sometimes done with one stoke and sometimes with 2

Eva considers sh as a separate character from ch + plume diacritic, so I've
included its stroke count here. But personally I classify sh as ch plus the
plume diacritic - the plume diacritic terminates at the initial c stroke
thus giving the illusion of an initial s. Unless the writer was hyper
careful the plume termination would seldom occur mid h (as it sometimes does
and sometimes even penetrates the h - which would be consistent with my
reconstruction's). Also in terms of eye-hand-brain co-ordination a right
handed person writing left to right will on most occasions misjudge the
centre-point of a character slightly to the left, which would also account
for the leftward bias of the plume diacritic over the ch character.

Just to put the vms stroke count into perspective: In the Latinate
alphabet's equivalent of document hand (modern hand "printing" with a felt
tip pen) the lower case set has 9 single strokes letters, 14 two strokes, 2
three stokes and one 4 strokes, the upper case set has 3 single strokes, 13
two stokes, 7 three stokes, and 2 four strokes.

Thus if it were not for the ligatures the vms character set would be faster
to write than the Latinate alphabet, and even with the ligatures they take
no longer to write than the individual characters in isolation.  The vms
characters themselves are composed of a limited number of stroke types ( a
mere ten, compared to Latinate lower case's 15 distinct types of stroke -
note that I count inversions as different because the hand movements to
create them are different - whereas many folk count inversions as the same
stroke because they're visually the same shape only seen from a different
angle).

I think these facts are somewhat supportive of the shorthand school of
thought, the "speed-writing" faction of which have received shorter shrift
than I think they've deserved so far.

I've animation's planned for the future website that'll demonstrate writing
the characters, as well as arguments for initial/medial/final variants
(which reduces the character set) and for considering certain cursive joined
combinations such as ee and ii as individual graphemes (which expands the
character set), and for several of the characters containing more than a
single unit of information.

Barbara





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