(27-09-2018, 12:20 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From the very beginning my approach to the marginalia was to be optimistic and assume that it provided us with information useful for decoding the VMS.
Thus, I never gave serious consideration to pox leber as German words meaning goat's liver. For one thing, I could not connect those words with anything that would help decode the VMS, and, on the other hand, those words are ridiculous for a manuscript that concerns itself far more with botany than biology.
..
Pox leber actually concurs very well with medieval reality. For one thing, the dialects that spell German "nimm" as "nim" are, for the most part, the same ones that spell "boch" as "poch" (they commonly substitute "p" for "b" and "a" for "e"). And substituting x for ch or the other way around is not unusual either since Greek "x" is often transliterated as "ch".
Also, liver of all kinds is a very common ingredient of medieval medical remedies and charms and the marginalia on the last page is formatted very much like a charm, including the crosses. A mixture of vernacular plus Latin is also very common in charms and in medical recipes.
And a medical charm WOULD fit with botany in every way since plants were medicine, there were no synthetic drugs in those days.
It's important to have some understanding of medieval culture to decode a medieval manuscript.
(27-09-2018, 12:20 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Liber, a Latin word meaning book as a noun or free as an adjective certainly makes a lot more sense than your liver. If that dot were not there, you'd be OK with leber. But, sorry, that dot is there and you ignore it at your own peril.
There is absolutely no way the letter between l and b in leber/leben/lebe (or following the "b") is an "i". No way. No one wrote "i" as a cee shape. I've looked at THOUSANDS of manuscripts and I've never seen an "i" even vaguely close to the "e" in leber. How many medieval manuscripts have you read? I read them in half a dozen different languages.
[
attachment=2403]
That "blot" at the top is a different color and is on the edge of the parchment. It could be anything and does not look to be associated with the text in any way. The scribe writes "i" as shown on the right:
[
attachment=2405]
The last character in "leber/leben" might be "r" or might be "n" or might be a mistake they tried to rub out, but the angle is wrong for "i" and there is a curve attached on the right, so "i" is even unlikely for the last letter. The blot at the edge of the parchment might be ink, might be wax, might be something else, or, if it is ink, might be the descender on a line of text that got trimmed off. The marginalia scribe doesn't put the dots that big or that high above the letters.
Quote:Regarding your comment on "pf", know that the Free Dictionary has found 2,465 English words containing "pf", so perhaps it could be helpful to broaden your outlook though I concur it's likely German.
Did it occur to you that some of those are loanwords from German? Did you check to see how many of them are in Middle English? Modern English has three times as many words as Middle English, largely due to loanwords (and educational systems). Plus, I really don't have a translation for the last word on the first line. It's too messy to be sure of anything.
(27-09-2018, 12:45 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[quote="Morten St. George" pid='22538' dateline='1538047213']
There is absolutely no way the letter between l and b in leber/leben/lebe (or following the "b") is an "i". No way. No one wrote "i" as a cee shape. I've looked at THOUSANDS of manuscripts and I've never seen an "i" even vaguely close to the "e" in leber. How many medieval manuscripts have you read? I read them in half a dozen different languages.
After interpreting
pox leber as
por liber, I go on to establish a rational connection between
por liber and all of the following marginalia words:
oladabas,
portas,
abia,
maria,
ubren,
mich, and
o, not to mention two sequences of Roman numerals.
Are you able to connect any of those words with goat’s liver?
Quote:Morten St George: After interpreting pox leber as por liber, I go on to establish a rational connection between por liber and all of the following marginalia words: oladabas, portas, abia, maria, ubren, mich, and o, not to mention two sequences of Roman numerals.
Are you able to connect any of those words with goat’s liver?
goat's liver is not my translation, I came across the phrase referenced in a thesis submitted to the University of Wisconsin in 1902, Charles H. Handschinbut, and it was proposed by one of the speakers at the Villa Mandragore conference (and I don't know if the idea is his to connect it to the VMS or someone earlier). BUT, it is completely reasonable to suggest it and I do not discount the idea because it can be defended on numerous levels...
- The word "maria" and other biblical names were frequently used in medicinal charms and remedies.
- Repetitious homonymic Latin words like vix/fix, etc. were frequently inserted in charms.
- The crosses were frequently added between words in medicinal charms and remedies to indicate when to genuflect while chanting the charm.
- Liver is mentioned frequently as an ingredient in medicinal charms and remedies.
- Languages were typically mixed in medicinal charms and remedies.
- If the last phrase is "so nim gaf mich", the grammar is fractured and is not the natural way to order the words in German, but it could be transliterated as "so to take gave to me" which could be interpreted as "so to ingest gave me" or so to take with me, gave to me" or in good English, "So he gave it to me to take." which is not necessarily the best interpretation out of several possibilities, but it would be completely consistent with someone having been given a remedy either to use right away or to take with them (e.g., to take home or to take on a journey).
So, yes, "pox leber" can be connected logically to the rest of it and, in fact, would be fairly common for the time. You should look at some of the examples of medicinal charms on my blog. They are a mixture of Latin, German, biblical and Kabbalistic Hebrew "power" words and names.
And one does not have to change the letter "e" into "i" to make it work.
Examples:
Introductory: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. to be written on parchment or engraved on talismans.
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.. Look especially at the last one.
Of course, you have to be able to read them to see that they mention various kinds of animal parts as ingredients and that they are a mixture of languages.
I'm not saying 116v is a charm, but it does follow many of the medieval conventions for charms (which were often added to the last page of manuscripts).
(27-09-2018, 12:45 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I really don't have a translation for the last word on the first line. It's too messy to be sure of anything.
For my part, I am not afraid to take a guess at
umer untpfer.
I view it as alluding to
u(nter) mer unt(er) pfer(d).
The
mer is French for
sea,
unter is German for
under, and
pferd is German for
horse. An under-sea horse, that is, a seahorse. In mythology, seahorses pulled the chariot of Neptune and as such would symbolize the carrying of cargo through the sea.
By free city of the great sea Saline,
That carries encore the stone to the stomach,
Thus, the seahorse
carries (the "portas" at the end of the next line of marginalia) the stone through the sea Saline.
(28-09-2018, 01:15 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (27-09-2018, 12:45 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I really don't have a translation for the last word on the first line. It's too messy to be sure of anything.
For my part, I am not afraid to take a guess at umer untpfer.
I view it as alluding to u(nter) mer unt(er) pfer(d).
The mer is French for sea, unter is German for under, and pferd is German for horse. An under-sea horse, that is, a seahorse. In mythology, seahorses pulled the chariot of Neptune and as such would symbolize the carrying of cargo through the sea.
...
Well, you have a good imagination, Morten, but adding in letters to "make" it say something is not research. It's storytelling.
(28-09-2018, 01:25 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-09-2018, 01:15 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (27-09-2018, 12:45 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I really don't have a translation for the last word on the first line. It's too messy to be sure of anything.
For my part, I am not afraid to take a guess at umer untpfer.
I view it as alluding to u(nter) mer unt(er) pfer(d).
The mer is French for sea, unter is German for under, and pferd is German for horse. An under-sea horse, that is, a seahorse. In mythology, seahorses pulled the chariot of Neptune and as such would symbolize the carrying of cargo through the sea.
...
Well, you have a good imagination, Morten, but adding in letters to "make" it say something is not research. It's storytelling.
Well, I've seen
u. as an abbreviation for
under and
unt. as an abbreviation for
unter, so I might not be adding as many letters as you think. Moreover, there's a
d following the
sea wave in the next line of marginalia.
Like nearly everything else on f116v, those words should have some connection with the cited prophecy.
Quote:Well, I've seen u. as an abbreviation for under and unt. as an abbreviation for unter, ...
They did not abbreviate those words without apostrophes/macrons. They did not use a period at the end of a word to abbreviate (in fact, in many manuscripts, periods were absent altogether even if other symbols were common). There was always a tail, or a line over them, or a curved cap, or an apostrophe that looks like a modern apostrophe (these symbols/shapes are found in the VMS main text).
They were quite fond of apostrophe symbols in the middle ages. They had half a dozen different kinds. Not only are there apostrophe-shaped glyphs in the VMS main text, but the labels under the zodiac symbols are full of apostrophes. Why would the marginalia writer of the last page leave them out, when they they show up in many other parts of the manuscript, and when there is a word with a macron in the same marginalia handwriting on the top of folio 17r?
You're proposing a system of abbreviation that not only is not indicated on this page, but which was foreign to medieval scribes.
(28-09-2018, 05:52 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:Well, I've seen u. as an abbreviation for under and unt. as an abbreviation for unter, ...
They did not abbreviate those words without apostrophes/macrons. They did not use a period at the end of a word to abbreviate (in fact, in many manuscripts, periods were absent altogether even if other symbols were common). There was always a tail, or a line over them, or a curved cap, or an apostrophe that looks like a modern apostrophe (these symbols/shapes are found in the VMS main text).
They were quite fond of apostrophe symbols in the middle ages. They had half a dozen different kinds. Not only are there apostrophe-shaped glyphs in the VMS main text, but the labels under the zodiac symbols are full of apostrophes. Why would the marginalia writer of the last page leave them out, when they they show up in many other parts of the manuscript, and when there is a word with a macron in the same marginalia handwriting on the top of folio 17r?
You're proposing a system of abbreviation that not only is not indicated on this page, but which was foreign to medieval scribes.
As an expert in handwriting, you can only defeat my seahorse storyline by claiming that I misread one or more of the letters, for example, by saying that the
r of
umer is really an
n. Since you did not do that, and since you are not providing an alternative suggestion for the meaning of
umer untpher, I'm sticking with my lovely story about the seahorse.
As you apparently have not read my essay, you would be unaware that I am claiming that the VMS marginalia was written by a great poet laureate, to which I can add that such poet laureate, in his other writings, did in fact use the letter u (without apostrophes / macrons) as an abbreviation, which was the first known use of this common abbreviation.
I have not responded to (or refuted) many of your claims because you are piling one hypothesis on top of another.
There's no way to respond to that because the upper layers are all based on the ones below and if you flick a finger at the lower levels, everything above them topples. There's no point in even commenting on the ones above because they have no foundation.