Re: VMs: Folio and Quire numbers

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Another explanation would be two scribes applying a
> non-deterministic 
> algorithm (for example, "transliterate this Latin
> text into Voynich 
> characters, add some of the designated null
> characters wherever you 
> want, and if a character is 'final', be sure and
> leave a space after it.")

> [...] 

> I envision two scribes working from a stack of
> plaintext pages, each 
> applying the algorithm more or less consistently
> within his pages but 
> making different choices from the other scribe as to
> frequency and 
> selection of nulls. As each scribe finishes his
> page, he adds it to the 
> pile which will become the VMS and starts on a new
> one, thus causing the 
> interleaving of languages A and B when the encrypted
> pages are put in 
> the same order as the plaintext ones.

Having seen that there are actually 'dialects'
in between A and B, in the parts not transcribed
by Currier when he made his analysis, I am not
too sure about the two scribes theory. However,
it allows one interesting possibility:

Scribes A and B sit together and define a common
'secret language'. They start writing but as 
time goes on their styles diverge. They need to
coin new words, for example.
The language used in the pharma section and that
used in the astro/zodiac sections are quite similar. 
A would have started on the pharma pages and then
did all the Herbal-A pages. B would have started on
astro-cosmo (with stars and nymphs) and then did
all the other sections that have stars and nymphs.
He was ready before A, so after he completed the
stars section, he did some of the missing herbal
pages, which we know as herbal-B and got 
interleaved with Herbal-A. (And then, when they
saw the horrible discrepancy, they disgustedly
left the MS as a pile of sheets, forgotten in a 
corner somewhere - but that's not important
right now).

It is not impossible that Pharma was written before
Herbal-A. There are some plant drawings that appear
almost identically in both, as if the Pharma
was a sketch of the full page plant.

The real problem with this theory is that this
means they would have started writing on the 
foldout folios and finished with the normal-sized
ones. To me this does not make sense, as it is
commonly assumed that the foldouts are there
because the scribe had some odd-sized leftover
pieces of vellum.

Cheers, Rene

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