You are right. I haven't seen as many mss as you. Just enough of them with a palaeographer to say that any graph can have different variants. It is not the quantity of the manuscripts we have seen but the quality of the search. It is like trying to find a microscopic needle not in a haystack but in thousands haystacks.
So this does not consist of who has read more. Nihil novum sub sole.
(01-01-2019, 11:21 PM)Beatrice Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are right. I haven't seen as many mss as you. Just enough of them with a palaeographer to say that any graph can have different variants...
I agree that there is a great deal of flexibility in how the scribal conventions can be used, I see a few oddball variations every day, but they are still readable. I do not agree that any glyph can be varied in any way because if that were true, other scribes would
not be able to read the variations. The variations generally fall into patterns that can be discerned by context.
I also agree that most of most of the VMS glyph-shapes can be found in Latin manuscripts.
But you challenged my statement that some of them might be inventions, and wrote, "...
all of them appear in
most mss..." and I've never seen any evidence that this is true.
cTh,
cKh, cFh, and
p do not occur in most manuscripts, or even in any manuscripts that I have seen so far, so it's incorrect to say they appear in "most" manuscripts.
.
I have some ideas on why they are drawn the way they are, and I suspect they are inventions based on scribal
ideas BUT that is not the same as saying they exist in most manuscripts. I think we have to be as accurate as possible in characterizing the VMS glyphs. You need to provide examples to support this kind of assertion.
(02-01-2019, 02:58 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (01-01-2019, 11:21 PM)Beatrice Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are right. I haven't seen as many mss as you. Just enough of them with a palaeographer to say that any graph can have different variants...
I agree that there is a great deal of flexibility in how the scribal conventions can be used, I see a few oddball variations every day, but they are still readable. I do not agree that any glyph can be varied in any way because if that were true, other scribes would not be able to read the variations. The variations generally fall into patterns that can be discerned by context.
I also agree that most of most of the VMS glyph-shapes can be found in Latin manuscripts.
But you challenged my statement that some of them might be inventions, and wrote, "...all of them appear in most mss..." and I've never seen any evidence that this is true. cTh, cKh, cFh, and p do not occur in most manuscripts, or even in any manuscripts that I have seen so far, so it's incorrect to say they appear in "most" manuscripts.
.
I have some ideas on why they are drawn the way they are, and I suspect they are inventions based on scribal ideas BUT that is not the same as saying they exist in most manuscripts. I think we have to be as accurate as possible in characterizing the VMS glyphs. You need to provide examples to support this kind of assertion.
Just want to say that I agree with JKP absolutely on this...while many of the glyphs certainly resemble Latin letters or Arabic numerals, the gallows and bench-gallows are, in my experience, unique to the VMS, as are some of the rare characters like those on (e.g.) f. 57v.
In my experience, things like the gallows are found in notarial scripts of around 1400 and at least some of the rare signs seem to be derived from astronomical mss. I think it is a mistake to limit yourself to digitized mss. i
You can certainly see things that are similar to gallows characters stretching above the top line in many notarial documents, but those looped extensions of ascenders are decorative, not semantic.
I'm a little surprised to see you assume that my experience is limited to digitized manuscripts. It isn't.