>
> There's the case of the one legged gallows - the first time I
I'm glad you mentioned that - it's something I've been aware of for a while but particularly now that the high-res images are available. Sometimes the left leg is kinked, sometimes the right, sometimes both. Occasionally it looks as though the legs have overwritten 'c' or 'e' strokes.
Another observation - look at f103r ( http://130.132.81.124/VOYNICHIMG/size4/D0029/1006254.jpg ), in particular the lower half (e.g. 4th line from the bottom, third word). A large number of the 'sh' characters appear to have been written as a 'c' with ligature, followed by a superscript '2' (the plume) with the second 'c' attached to the '2'. The 2c are often significantly darker than the first c. Also in a lot of the occurences of 'ch' the second 'c' is noticably darker than the first, as though more thought went into placing it, or it was drawn more slowly or with more pressure. I don't know enough about the dynamics of quill writing to be able to say what would cause this sort of darkening, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Incidentally, if the sh characters were sometimes written as c-2-c then it might explain some of the different plume types - try drawing the glyph that way and it's a bit like a written tongue-twister, it's easy to get the plume and/or second 'c' the wrong way round.
Cheers,
Jon (the one with no 'h') Grove.
> recorded a two
> legged gallows with a crook in the right leg, I drew a glyph
> for this and
> represented it as a wierdo. When I saw it a few other times,
> I went back
> and looked at each count. What had happened here was that
> the author began
> to write a one-legged gallows, but paused and altered the glyph to the
> two-legged kind. Each time he almost made this mistake, he paused and
> altered the writing, not just at the beginning where certain
> similar glyphs
> might not be set in his memory, but much later on, when this
> mistake should
> not have happened. The same has happened with two-legged
> gallows that have
> one loop and two. In these cases again, the author paused,
> focused, and
> then altered the glyph. These are just two of the hundreds
> of times the
> author paused and made a conscious choice between one form or another.
> These events should be identified and recorded by any modern
> trancription so
> they may be quantified and studied.