Each letter is scored differently based on how widely the letter varied in medieval scripts. The letter “o”, for example, is not going to vary as significantly as an ornate letter like “g” or “h-with-a-tail”.<\/p>\n

A perfect match scores 6. Out of tens of thousands of individual-letter clips, only one 6 has been given so far. Very close matches generally score 5 because even close matches don’t quite look like the same handwriting. The overall shape might be the same, but there are usually subtle differences in pressure, stroke order, or the way the parts connect.<\/p>\n

The first (and more important) answer is that I have a list of criteria for rating each letter\u2014these could be taught to another person as long as that person has experience in reading old scripts.<\/p>\n

The second answer is anecdotal…<\/p>\n

One day I noticed two sets of samples lined up next to each other with identical scores. I thought I had discovered two different manuscripts written by the same scribe. As it turned out, I had inadvertently sampled the same manuscript (different folios) almost four years apart. The results were exactly the same.<\/p>\n

Why does it matter?<\/h4>\n

The marginalia may have been added long after the VMS was created, so why would I devote so many years to studying it?<\/p>\n

It’s possible it was added later, but research into the letterforms has convinced me that the marginalia may<\/em> have been written close to the time of the VMS, perhaps even at the same time. If so, then the marginalia writer was potentially a designer, advisor, or even illustrator.<\/p>\n

Even if the marginalia was added later, anything that can be learned about the Voynich Manuscript<\/em> brings us a little closer to understanding it, and if the source of the script style can be located (or connected with other documents in the same handwriting), it might help unravel the missing provenance.<\/p>\n

J.K. Petersen<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Copyright 2018 J.K. Petersen, All Rights Reserved<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s a challenge to find paleographic matches to the VMS. I’ve been hunting for almost eleven years, sampled more than 50,000 characters from scripts that were similar to the marginalia or to the main text, and developed tools to more objectively compare scripts based on slant, heaviness, spacing (between letters and lines), and the individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[152,101],"tags":[286,185],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6274"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6459,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6274\/revisions\/6459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voynichportal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}