Flicking through the VM pages looking for something else, I came to You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. and decided to have a closer look. I don't recall a dedicated discussion of this page on the forum, but this may be wrong. Either way this is the kind of page that was discussed extensively in mailing list days, so nothing I say will be new.
Observations:
1. As noted by Glen Claston, this page is a major clue that Q13 is out of order. Since You are not allowed to view links.
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and has a very fancy initial, it was likely first. But even if one would not put it first in the quire, it is hard to deny that this looks like the kind of page that traditionally introduces a new topic or chapter.
2. On this page it is exceptionally obvious that the top line carries more gallows, specifically EVA [p]. I don't often use Voynichese.com, hope this link shows what I mean: You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. . This reminds of legal documents, where we often see the ascenders on the top line enlarged. Below Burham Cathedral's Magna Carta.
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attachment=4046]
Now if this parallel is valid in any way, that somehow gallows are used because this is the top line, then the implications are significant: it would mean that these gallows replace something else that takes up less space.
3. Paragraphs. The top half of the page appears to be one paragraph with signs in the left margin. Below there are three clearly separated paragraphs, with a blank space on the last line and a larger gallow as the first character. Only the last paragraph has a rather strange beginning.
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attachment=4047]
What does this mean? Especially, why start with an uncharacteristically huge paragraph, which apparently requires marginal annotation?
This page shows a few other things (that have been noticed and mentioned before):
- initial characters are very nicely lined up
- initial characters are a very small sub-set of the full character set
Also, the single characters in the margin largely, but not completely coincide with this limited set of line-initial characters.
Each section of the VMS (I can't remember if it's all of them, but most of them) has a full page of text. I have been thinking of these as "key" or "marker" pages (either in the sense of introductory/preface pages or as index pages or something with bullet points), but this is entirely subjective and just to keep things straight in my mind. I don't know what they actually are.
In medieval manuscripts, the two kinds of folios that especially tend to have marginal capitals, or other marginal embellishments or markers, tend to be poetry (this folio doesn't look like poetry but some of the others do) and "key" pages (in the sense of introductory or index information or pages that sum things up in the medieval version of "bullet points").
Hang on... I'll list them, back in a few...
1r - dense-text page at the beginning of the large-plant drawings.
58r - dense-text double-page that has been bound between the wheel page and a few more large-plant drawings (position could maybe be questioned?)
66r - dense-text page-and-a-half with markers preceding a large-plant drawing (the cosmo pages and zodiac wheels have been bound in after this)
76r - dense-text page with margin markers preceding the nymphs with the grotto-like "hat" shape in the left margin.
85r - dense-text page preceding four-corners diagram with diagonal quadrants
86r foldout - dense-text page preceding the diagram with tors and birds (the rosettes foldout is bound after this)
103r - section of dense-text pages
I'm hesitant to use words like preceding and following because we don't know how these were originally conceived to be read (maybe they were not intended to be bound as signatures of four or eight, but of a less-conventional two), but some of them are on the backs of others (indisputably on the same sheet), so there is probably some association between those that are adjacent.
Koen, I like the way you marked up the folio with color.
Did you noticed the inconsistency in the transition from the purple to the yellow section? Normally one would expect the EVA-P (one line higher) to begin the yellow section... and yet it has a dangling end on the right-hand side (a shorter line) which one would associate with the previous paragraph.
I wonder what could cause this inconsistency... unless the lines are all padded out (right-justified) as a second step and maybe they goofed???
Also, if you look at the 7th line from the bottom, there is a character near the beginning (the second token) that looks like a stretched-out Latin "cis" char but this is not a normal VMS char. And look how much space is before and after, as though space were left to add something later and someone with a deft hand added this char.
This char probably belongs in Rene's thread about oddball VMS glyphs. It is distinctly different from the other EVA-m and EVA-g chars.
Indeed, it almost looks like the line starting with the "cis" char was centered under the paragraph and the first word of the next paragraph bumped up in the empty space on the left. Let me try to illustrate:
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attachment=4053]
Also, the gallow words on top are suspicious by themselves, three of them start with bench + benched gallow. This is relatively rare and usually occurs at the top of a paragraph.
Yes, good way to show it and if this is what was intended when it was made, it makes you wonder if that unusual char is an instructional character (like an editing mark) rather than an actual VMS glyph.
It's written with a very confident hand (someone with good fine-motor skills, like whoever added the nose to Aries). The usual VMS text is a bit more tentative, not quite as smooth and expert.
The fancy gallows at the beginning is neither EVA-k nor EVA-p. It's more like the "joining" gallows one sometimes sees where it looks like EVA-k and EVA-p are combined (there are several instances of this) except... on this folio, nothing is joined, it's a partial of one or the other.
Also, notice that little "hook" on the top of the left ascender. It's a hook, not a loop, which coincides with the hook that arises from the stroke order for the gallows when written in the normal way (not large and hollow). The tops are not symmetric.
[To mods, are we going to get our EVA and medieval font choices back??]
(26-02-2020, 10:35 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The top half of the page appears to be one paragraph with signs in the left margin
Or several paragraphs, each one marked by a symbol to the left.
If they are paragraphs, they are out of character with the rest of the manuscript.
There are some weird things in the VMS, considering how overall "tidy" it is. The way markers in the left don't line up with each other and don't line up with main-text lines and sometimes not with paragraphs.
The diagrams have oddities too, in terms of numbers. Where one would expect 12, there are 13, where one would expect an even number, there might be an odd, where one might expect moon phases, there are odd combinations of dark and light.