29-06-2026, 06:30 PM
Dear all,
let me please present you my current work.
First, my current working hypothesis: The VMS is a compendium of midwifery knowledge compiled during the turmoils within and around the Knights Hospitaller and the rise of the Aragonese, and written in a specifically for this purpose designed and constructed script - on Malta, in the first decades of the 15th. century. Please note, that I honestly doubt this is the ultimative solution - but I assume it's a good pivot point for further investigations.
My main and leading assumptions are as follows:
1. The VMS is (to me at least, obviously) a compendium of midwifery knowledge. No secret society behind it, no cryptography, no deeper metaphorical setup constructing deeper enlighment only to share with the rulers who are worth to know in the sight of God. And not necessarily funded in far-away countries. All just things, your ordinary Jane Doe Midwife should know. This does not automatically rule out metaphorical comparisons or complex systems we nowadays would consider superstition in a given detail, but focussing eg. on the illustrations I would tend to say: if you see a bathing female nude, I assume that Occam's razor surely suggest a bathing nude in first place and not some half-divine figure from forthcoming apocalypses, the power of Qi or similar. Let's keep it simple.
2. Books about midwifery are rare, though midwifery was daily practice and common to use. This is knowledge that for some very good reasons usually was handed over personally from one generation of commited women to the next, normally "on the job", and for centuries, normally strictly orally. And even this had to be done with a lot of precautionary measures. Seeing it written down is a very rare thing. This may have, BTW, led to some blind spot within the one or the other VMS theory. An usual book is an unlikely book. Around 1400~1430 AD (I take this slot as a given) Malta already had at least one vivid hospital, most likely two, and like in Akkon, Rhodos, Sigena or other places, Mulieres Sti. Johannis and their staff (mostly local woman) were active here, too, and as far historians tell us, scientifically leading. But the loss of estates in the Holy Land led to a severe crisis within the Knights Hospitaller and their related enterprises. The Order concentrated their activities to Rhodos. And so (long before the order relocated to Malta), the future of the care work on Malta was unclear. A relocation for nuns, often originatrd from european countries and sometimes of noble birth, was always possible. One for the local midwifes wasn't, at least not for all of them. So there might have been the decision to keep these treasures alive. Even in case the chain of support would not break on Malta, it would have been handy to have a compendium that might be used for teaching lessons to successors. And yes, Malta, is franky spoken, a vague idea. Several places would work without big differences. But, alas, everyone needs a place to start.
3. But how to maintain this knowledge? By writing it down. I assume that a team of several people helped to write down the oral explanations of the local Maltese midwives. Hence, several scribes. Hence, several ducts. But they had to master further challenges: there was no script for (early) Maltese. And most probably, the team had no shared language with those. Maybe the midwives even had different dialects. So they found an obvious solution by setting up a script. This included a few decisons: the simplified radically what they hear into a small group of consonants. Maybe they did the same with the vowels, maybe they skipped them directly. E.g. 13 different fricatives as modern Arabian has, can easily be stripped together to a few. Same with plosives. Nasals, Liquids - one each is enough. I already tested it with classical Arabian, and generally it works - I will soon present here my first steps as well in detail. Of course, with lower Shannon entropy come more homonyms. But the root structure of any semitic language is full of redundance. Nevertheless, some peculiarities of VMS may root in corrective measures to avoid homonyms - e.g.: clear word borders, positional markers, ligatures, and maybe, additionally, vowels or matres. With only a small subset of letters needed they could work on a system for quick writing and, as I assume, integrated this as well. Again, I see no way at the moment, to reduce the possible phonems to graphems in a way that means easy undoing it the other way round. Maybe for ever. But for reading a language one already knows this not necessary. It's just a bummer we don't know and maybe never will.
4. Beside the work on further evidences that this might have been the key to the alphabet and maybe additional estimations there, I'm working on a second corpus lingustic topic, and this is to analyze, whether it is at least not totally unlikely the VMS was written (or better dictated) in a semitic language. I adopted a method here from pattern recognition and I named it "fake lemmata". This includes the setup of word lists (including lists for hapax and dislegomena) and calculate entropy and collocations. Whenever an observed pattern turns out to be significant (fake lemma) it is replaced in a derivated corpus (shadow corpus) as a dedicated token. This is done iteratively. For semitic languages it is expected, that the collocations would rise in distinctiveness and the distribution will be more stable. This comes with several stages of root lexica, word lengthes, TTR, change of Zipf curves, entropy and more Information to analyse. This is, of course, not only done for VMS but also for Maltese, Siculo-arabian, classic Arabian, Hebrew and several addional comparison corpora. The amount of operations is then the measure to compare, like, but not the same as the Levenshtein distance.
Let me please remind at least myself in addition, that every additional assumption makes the overall approach more unlikely - even if makes the approach at first glance additionally plausible. We all tend to such cognitive bias, as we know from Kahneman and Tversky (and Slovic, if I recall it correctly).
So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.
Thank you in advance.
Dorothée
let me please present you my current work.
First, my current working hypothesis: The VMS is a compendium of midwifery knowledge compiled during the turmoils within and around the Knights Hospitaller and the rise of the Aragonese, and written in a specifically for this purpose designed and constructed script - on Malta, in the first decades of the 15th. century. Please note, that I honestly doubt this is the ultimative solution - but I assume it's a good pivot point for further investigations.
My main and leading assumptions are as follows:
1. The VMS is (to me at least, obviously) a compendium of midwifery knowledge. No secret society behind it, no cryptography, no deeper metaphorical setup constructing deeper enlighment only to share with the rulers who are worth to know in the sight of God. And not necessarily funded in far-away countries. All just things, your ordinary Jane Doe Midwife should know. This does not automatically rule out metaphorical comparisons or complex systems we nowadays would consider superstition in a given detail, but focussing eg. on the illustrations I would tend to say: if you see a bathing female nude, I assume that Occam's razor surely suggest a bathing nude in first place and not some half-divine figure from forthcoming apocalypses, the power of Qi or similar. Let's keep it simple.
2. Books about midwifery are rare, though midwifery was daily practice and common to use. This is knowledge that for some very good reasons usually was handed over personally from one generation of commited women to the next, normally "on the job", and for centuries, normally strictly orally. And even this had to be done with a lot of precautionary measures. Seeing it written down is a very rare thing. This may have, BTW, led to some blind spot within the one or the other VMS theory. An usual book is an unlikely book. Around 1400~1430 AD (I take this slot as a given) Malta already had at least one vivid hospital, most likely two, and like in Akkon, Rhodos, Sigena or other places, Mulieres Sti. Johannis and their staff (mostly local woman) were active here, too, and as far historians tell us, scientifically leading. But the loss of estates in the Holy Land led to a severe crisis within the Knights Hospitaller and their related enterprises. The Order concentrated their activities to Rhodos. And so (long before the order relocated to Malta), the future of the care work on Malta was unclear. A relocation for nuns, often originatrd from european countries and sometimes of noble birth, was always possible. One for the local midwifes wasn't, at least not for all of them. So there might have been the decision to keep these treasures alive. Even in case the chain of support would not break on Malta, it would have been handy to have a compendium that might be used for teaching lessons to successors. And yes, Malta, is franky spoken, a vague idea. Several places would work without big differences. But, alas, everyone needs a place to start.
3. But how to maintain this knowledge? By writing it down. I assume that a team of several people helped to write down the oral explanations of the local Maltese midwives. Hence, several scribes. Hence, several ducts. But they had to master further challenges: there was no script for (early) Maltese. And most probably, the team had no shared language with those. Maybe the midwives even had different dialects. So they found an obvious solution by setting up a script. This included a few decisons: the simplified radically what they hear into a small group of consonants. Maybe they did the same with the vowels, maybe they skipped them directly. E.g. 13 different fricatives as modern Arabian has, can easily be stripped together to a few. Same with plosives. Nasals, Liquids - one each is enough. I already tested it with classical Arabian, and generally it works - I will soon present here my first steps as well in detail. Of course, with lower Shannon entropy come more homonyms. But the root structure of any semitic language is full of redundance. Nevertheless, some peculiarities of VMS may root in corrective measures to avoid homonyms - e.g.: clear word borders, positional markers, ligatures, and maybe, additionally, vowels or matres. With only a small subset of letters needed they could work on a system for quick writing and, as I assume, integrated this as well. Again, I see no way at the moment, to reduce the possible phonems to graphems in a way that means easy undoing it the other way round. Maybe for ever. But for reading a language one already knows this not necessary. It's just a bummer we don't know and maybe never will.
4. Beside the work on further evidences that this might have been the key to the alphabet and maybe additional estimations there, I'm working on a second corpus lingustic topic, and this is to analyze, whether it is at least not totally unlikely the VMS was written (or better dictated) in a semitic language. I adopted a method here from pattern recognition and I named it "fake lemmata". This includes the setup of word lists (including lists for hapax and dislegomena) and calculate entropy and collocations. Whenever an observed pattern turns out to be significant (fake lemma) it is replaced in a derivated corpus (shadow corpus) as a dedicated token. This is done iteratively. For semitic languages it is expected, that the collocations would rise in distinctiveness and the distribution will be more stable. This comes with several stages of root lexica, word lengthes, TTR, change of Zipf curves, entropy and more Information to analyse. This is, of course, not only done for VMS but also for Maltese, Siculo-arabian, classic Arabian, Hebrew and several addional comparison corpora. The amount of operations is then the measure to compare, like, but not the same as the Levenshtein distance.
Let me please remind at least myself in addition, that every additional assumption makes the overall approach more unlikely - even if makes the approach at first glance additionally plausible. We all tend to such cognitive bias, as we know from Kahneman and Tversky (and Slovic, if I recall it correctly).
So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.
Thank you in advance.
Dorothée
![[Image: Maltese_600.jpg]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Maltese_600.jpg)