This is an interesting consideration, although the hypothetic stroke would be very short and immediately head over to the "m"'s ascender.
Yes we must not forget about that "round object". It should fit into the context somehow.
By the way, I noted that I accidentally deleted the old scan of You are not allowed to view links.
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Koen, the use of nim, spelled as it is in the VMS, is valid.
I spent considerable time looking through 12th to 15th century documents for both gaf and nim to make sure they were in actual use in documents as seen on the last page VMS and I found both of them.
They are definitely regional. In fact, you could almost locate a manuscript by whether it was spelled nim, nym, or nimm (or could at least locate where the scribe learned the language). These quirks are specific to certain lowland, Alsace and Tirolian areas.
I wanted to blog about it because it was quite an interesting journey to locate them and study the linguistic patterns, but I simply can't spare the time right now to compile my notes into digestible text.
The grammar of all the marginalia smacks of someone who used German but didn't know it terribly well (or was not strong in grammar). The same oddities are seen at the top of the last page and in the top page marginalia earlier in the manuscript, mostly but not quite German, the kind of thing you might expect if German were the person's second language and they learned it later rather than earlier in life. I know people who arrived in my area as adult immigrants and never completely learned English. They blend it with their native languages and are difficult to understand and the way they speak reminds me of the VMS marginalia.
(17-07-2016, 01:17 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is an interesting consideration, although the hypothetic stroke would be very short and immediately head over to the "m"'s ascender.
Yes we must not forget about that "round object". It should fit into the context somehow.
...
This is something I have blogged about (sorry, don't have time to look up the link, unfortunately I have to run again).
I don't think the round object is part of the text. I think it's more likely a drawing and there's a possibility it was on the page before the text was added.
Quote:and there's a possibility it was on the page before the text was added.
given the good contrast observed, I'd rather say that it was added
later
(18-07-2016, 12:11 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:and there's a possibility it was on the page before the text was added.
given the good contrast observed, I'd rather say that it was added later
Anton, the contrast is a good point and is also interesting to observe in the text itself.
The mixed Latin/German text (separate from the Voynichese) looks like it may have been done by two different people or at two different times. Some of the characters are rounder, slightly larger and more faded, some are more like the Germanic text at the end (gas mich/gaf mich) and yet they are not quite different enough to know for certain if it's one hand or two (with a possible third hand for the Voynichese... maybe).
JKP - yes, if we want to assume it is a Germanic dialect and such a sentence is intended, we must also assume a non-native speaker. Which makes me wonder: is that word order even found in Indo-European languages? Maybe Latin? Though that would assume a native speaker of Latin I guess, so a new problem.
Also, aren't marginalia generally in a language the maker is comfortable with? Indeed, marginalia are often a source for information about the copyists' native language instead of the Latin of the main text...
(18-07-2016, 06:26 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP - yes, if we want to assume it is a Germanic dialect and such a sentence is intended, we must also assume a non-native speaker. Which makes me wonder: is that word order even found in Indo-European languages? Maybe Latin? Though that would assume a native speaker of Latin I guess, so a new problem.
Also, aren't marginalia generally in a language the maker is comfortable with? Indeed, marginalia are often a source for information about the copyists' native language instead of the Latin of the main text...
Yes, as far as I've seen, marginalia tend to be in a language that's comfortable for the person who's writing, but what if the marginal writer were contemporary with the VMS scribe... that person might choose to annotate in a common language, even if it were not the native tongue of the VMS scribe or the marginal scribe.
I had some interesting experiences while traveling through eastern Europe. Some of our conversations went through three or four people (and languages) in order for an idea to be conveyed. We couldn't speak directly to each other in our native tongues but we could get an idea across in a language we had in common.
I don't know if the marginalia and main text are from the same time period, but the marginal text is a flavor of Gothic Cursive, which was particularly common in the late 14th and 15th centuries, so it's possible that they lived at the same time. When you further look at how the marginal text and images on that page (and the Voynichese text) seem to have at least some spatial relationship to each other, it strengthens the possibility that the VMS scribes (there were at least two, as far as I can tell from the main text) and the marginalia writer MAY have been contemporaries.
From what I have seen in MSs (roughly) contemporary to the Voynich MS, the specific combination 'so nim' is common in German texts.
Grammatically speaking, following these words one would expect only an object or some adverbial clause.
Another verb would not be expected.
I agree that a multilingual context would be the best (only?) way to explain someone writing marginalia in a language he doesn't master. Moreover, a multicultural environment is not unlikely given the VM's nature.
This would imply that the note can't be a spell or charm, but must be an instruction, remark or other message meant for another person. "X gave me Y to take" seems to argue against it being an instruction or remark about the text.
Now word order is something all native speakers can do automatically. They will never mess it up like this. So if we must assume someone who was not used to the language, then why assume that he used contemporary spelling? Spelling conventions hardly existed for the vernacular, and people would generally spell according to pronunciation: write it the way you say it. While pronunciation (and hence spelling) and vocabulary vary across dialects, word order is fairly stable.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is: if we must assume a deviant word order, we must almost automatically assume deviant spelling and vocabulary as well. With all due consequences...
Although interesting, "gaf" is less likely than "gas" - first because there's virtually no place for the stroke, second because there is a character much like "f" in Line 0 (in that extremely strange last word which seems to end with "fer"), and its shape differs from the hypothetic "f" in "gaf"
"So nim gas mich" has the following advantages:
- it sounds natural (no deviations)
- it generally fits into possible contexts
- letter shapes are in accordance with other letters in the folio
And it has only two drawbacks:
- there's actually no space between "gas" and "mich"
- the round object is unexplained
But neither of these two is avoided with "gaf" instead of "gas".
So my vote would be for "gas" as a working thread.
About consistency in glyph shapes: has it been mentioned that both the -e- and the -n in valden look different than those in ubren? The -n could possibly be explained by an end-line flourish. I can't find an explanation for the -e-shape in walden though.