Yesterday, 11:15 PM
I've been looking at the last line of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and at some of the German readings that have been proposed for it. A different possibility occurred to me. I would segment part of the line as:
[Voynichese "words"] valsch vůren [...] so nim Got(ſ) mich [plummeting stone]
The two forms that particularly interest me are therefore valsch vůren, with possible normalized modern equivalent falsch führen. In fact, initial v- for f- is well attested in Middle High German.
Finding exact parallels is not straightforward. Depending on scribal practice, the initial u/v shapes could be differentiated in different ways, and modern editors might transcribe or normalize a comparable form quite differently (v-, u-, uv-, uu-, w-, etc.). The semicircular superscript sign, possibly indicating Umlaut, introduces another variable, so searching electronically for one particular spelling could be misleading.
Instead, nim rather than modern nimm seems less remarkable to me, but it still deserves some caution as far as spelling normalization is concerned, as does the possible Got(ſ).
This leads me to two related questions:
[Voynichese "words"] valsch vůren [...] so nim Got(ſ) mich [plummeting stone]
The two forms that particularly interest me are therefore valsch vůren, with possible normalized modern equivalent falsch führen. In fact, initial v- for f- is well attested in Middle High German.
Finding exact parallels is not straightforward. Depending on scribal practice, the initial u/v shapes could be differentiated in different ways, and modern editors might transcribe or normalize a comparable form quite differently (v-, u-, uv-, uu-, w-, etc.). The semicircular superscript sign, possibly indicating Umlaut, introduces another variable, so searching electronically for one particular spelling could be misleading.
Instead, nim rather than modern nimm seems less remarkable to me, but it still deserves some caution as far as spelling normalization is concerned, as does the possible Got(ſ).
This leads me to two related questions:
- Is the identification of the form I have tentatively written vůren with führen palaeographically and linguistically plausible for a 15th-century German text?
- If so, are there contemporary attestations of falsch + führen (in whatever spelling), and what would the construction have meant at the time?