We're not talking about Parkinson's here. There's no hint of tremor or small writing.
It's someone in a hurry, doing a boring task, having to add numbers to every-so-many pages.
It's just a messy 9. The stroke order of 9 and the stroke order of the "n" on folio 116 are different. So is the shape.
You are TRYING to turn it into an "n" based on your presumption that you want it to be "n". It's not. It's just an ordinary ordinal number, like all the others, but a bit messy. Have you never written a messy letter? It's still readable as "9".
(19-08-2019, 05:50 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We're not talking about Parkinson's here. There's no hint of tremor or small writing.
It's someone in a hurry, doing a boring task, having to add numbers to every-so-many pages.
It's just a messy 9. The stroke order of 9 and the stroke order of the "n" on folio 116 are different. So is the shape.
You are TRYING to turn it into an "n" based on your presumption that you want it to be "n". It's not. It's just an ordinary ordinal number, like all the others, but a bit messy. Have you never written a messy letter? It's still readable as "9".
JP, It's looking doubtful that we are going to reach agreement on this so perhaps it is best to simply move on.
I've checked out all of the quire numbers and there is not another instance of a "9" that can be reasonably interpreted to be anything other than a "9". Only the "9" on folio 72 is problematic.
It's pretty obvious that your inclination is to conclude that something has to be what it should be. That is a good rule to follow in normal circumstances but the VMS is not a normal manuscript.
There are many indications that the VMS marginalia constitutes what I would call "cryptic communication", for which a great deal of care and forethought would have gone into the planning of very stroke. It is highly unlikely that they would ever be "messy".
Are you sure that, if you had seen that "9" in another context or in isolation, you would be quick to take it as a "9"? I doubt it.
Thus, if the "9" on folio 72 can be seen as resembling an "n", it has to be because they wanted us to think of an "n".
Morten, the quire numbers are more than likely added after the VMS was no longer being worked on.
In the Middle Ages, binding occurred weeks or months or decades and often even centuries after the manuscript was created. They were not sold bound. Most of the time, they were sold unbound, just as people buy artwork unframed from artists and go to a framer and have it framed to their own taste. Book binding was the same, you chose your bookbinder and your style of binding and then they crafted it by hand.
The possibility that it is a messy 9 (which is what it looks like) is FAR greater than the possibility that someone ENCODED an "n" that doesn't look like an "n" into a quire number that was probably added years later.
Your explanation is by far more "out there" than mine.
(19-08-2019, 07:51 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Morten, the quire numbers are more than likely added after the VMS was no longer being worked on.
In the Middle Ages, binding occurred weeks or months or decades and often even centuries after the manuscript was created. They were not sold bound. Most of the time, they were sold unbound, just as people buy artwork unframed from artists and go to a framer and have it framed to their own taste. Book binding was the same, you chose your bookbinder and your style of binding and then they crafted it by hand.
The possibility that it is a messy 9 (which is what it looks like) is FAR greater than the possibility that someone ENCODED an "n" that doesn't look like an "n" into a quire number that was probably added years later.
Your explanation is by far more "out there" than mine.
I can't imagine why you think the VMS was created as something to be sold. Are you a supporter of one of the hoax theories?
I also don't know why you think the VMS was professionally prepared for binding. How do explain finding quire numbers "19" and "20" side by side? Why aren't the large botanical drawings all found together in one place?
As you know, I think the marginalia including page numbers and quire numbers (irrespective of different writing styles) were all made by the same person or persons at the same time.
In contrast, you are in effect claiming that the quire number "11m9" (written precisely as "11" followed by superscript "m9") is frequently seen in medieval manuscripts and therefore I am fully unjustified in suggesting that the final "m9" was manipulated to "mn" in order to allude to Michel Nostradamus.
![[Image: img-vms-quire-mn-9.jpg]](http://manuscrit-de-voynich.com/img-vms-quire-mn-9.jpg)
I'll concede that you may have the superior argument if you could kindly show us a few "11m9" (written precisely as "11" followed by superscript "m9") from other medieval manuscripts, so that we can compare them with the 11m(?) of the VMS. Please let us know for each, as best you can determine, the country of binding and also the century during which the respective manuscript was bound. I look forward to your response.
The VMS looks to me like it was never finished. Initials missing, labels missing, other signs of incompleteness.
Which means it may have sat in someone's household or studio for decades before someone decided to bind it.
It doesn't show the same signs of wear as foldouts that were carried around by doctors for regular use.
Whoever had it bound, whether it was 2 years later or 20 years later may have guessed the intended order of the folios.
(22-08-2019, 12:04 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMS looks to me like it was never finished. Initials missing, labels missing, other signs of incompleteness.
Which means it may have sat in someone's household or studio for decades before someone decided to bind it.
It doesn't show the same signs of wear as foldouts that were carried around by doctors for regular use.
Whoever had it bound, whether it was 2 years later or 20 years later may have guessed the intended order of the folios.
What makes you so sure that a large number of pages were not removed from the manuscript, with the order of the remaining pages rearranged,
prior to the application of both page numbers and quire numbers?
Has the current binder been subjected to radiocarbon dating? If not, why not? Could the VMS pages have been bound with a wrap-around string until the year 1600 or thereabouts?
On another matter, I've been checking out the
Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (highly recommended to me by Paris) and, so far, I've been unable to find a single instance of the use of superscript "m9" anywhere in medieval Europe. It seems they could combine the "9" with almost anything except an "m", probably because superscript "m" was itself a commonly used abbreviation, standing for "um", similar to how "9" stands for "us". But they had a different way of abbreviating words like
sumus; meanwhile, there is no "um' in
decimus or
undecimus.
In brief, manipulation of VMS quire numbers for cryptic objectives cannot be ruled out.
(22-08-2019, 02:17 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What makes you so sure that a large number of pages were not removed from the manuscript, with the order of the remaining pages rearranged, prior to the application of both page numbers and quire numbers?
Morten, that IS what I'm saying.
I'm saying that we
don't know what happened to the manuscript in between the time they stopped working on it and when it was bound. Any number of things might have happened, including sections being missing or folios being rearranged.
Binding was usually done sometime later, by different people. Whoever added the quire and folio numbers might not have known ANYTHING about who created the manuscript or what it contained. Frequently a bookbinder's assistant added the numbers.
Sometimes a particular person was assigned to add the numbers. A large number of Vatican manuscripts are foliated in the same handwriting but the manuscripts are all from different regions and centuries, which means they sat a very long time before those numbers were added (often a couple of centuries).
It was NORMAL and TYPICAL in medieval times for manuscripts to be bound by people other than those who created it or originally owned it, sometimes decades or centuries later. It's also very common to find unfinished manuscripts.
Plus, there was a lot of famine and plague in those days. Many manuscripts have no provenance because their owners died unexpectedly. We know nothing about the history of a great number of manuscripts other than what we can discern by touching, smelling, feeling, tasting, scientific testing, and reading.
(22-08-2019, 02:17 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On another matter, I've been checking out the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (highly recommended to me by Paris) and, so far, I've been unable to find a single instance of the use of superscript "m9" anywhere in medieval Europe. It seems they could combine the "9" with almost anything except an "m",
No Morten, they combined m9 for different meanings.
In this book (Lexicon Abbreviaturarum), I saw three different explanations for "m9"
- minus or manus (page 209)
- mandamus (page 209)
- tertius (page 16)
[
attachment=3200][
attachment=3201]
Quote:Morten St. George: On another matter, I've been checking out the Lexicon Abbreviaturarum (highly recommended to me by Paris) and, so far, I've been unable to find a single instance of the use of superscript "m9" anywhere in medieval Europe. It seems they could combine the "9" with almost anything except an "m",
Keep looking, Morten. They are out there.
Whether the "m" was superscripted was a matter of personal choice of the scribe and sometimes dependent on which number they were abbreviating (for example, in English we say 1st with "st" and 4th with "th"). It really didn't matter if it was superscripted, that was at the scribe's discretion. Some superscripted only the 9, some the last two letters, some didn't superscript at all.
There are abbreviations where the "m" was superscripted and they didn't add the 9 (see examples bottom-left) Sometimes they used superscripted t9 instead of m9. It depended partly on which language they were using (Latin, French or German, for example) and how many letters they wanted to superscript.
Here are some examples of ordinals abbreviated. Note that there is quite a bit of variation in the seven different examples of "primus". Sometimes "m" or "t9" was used (depending on number and language). Each of these is from a different manuscript:
![[Image: Ordinals9Abbrev.png]](https://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Ordinals9Abbrev.png)