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+--- Thread: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? (/thread-5083.html)
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - RenegadeHealer - 02-12-2025
(30-11-2025, 12:17 AM)Bluetoes101 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It was commissioned as a prop for a shop. It wasn't made to sell, but to sell other things, a loss-leader of sorts. Spend money to make money.
I think this idea works best if it is something meant to be from "far away" with very valuable knowledge.
A question popped into my mind whilst reading this thread, that I’m hoping someone with a better knowledge of the history of writing and bookbindery can answer: In the general place and time most of us agree the VMs was composed, how common, or precedented, were scribes and scriptoria that copied or published handwritted documents written in a script not familiar, nor in common use, to people in that place and time? Note that includes not only foreign pieces of writing, but also ones written in an unrecognizably archaic script of the local written language, and enciphered documents to which the scribe had no access to the key. Was quickly learning and copying pages and pages of a wholly new and subjectively meaningless writing system something any master craftsman level scribe was expected to be able to do, or get much practice at, outside of a few major continental crossroads of travel and trade, like Venice, Constantinople, or Jerusalem? Was this a service more provincial scriptoria would have offered? I imagine the ones that took commissions like this in the first place would charge more for the job, the less in demand it was and the more provincial we’re talking. It would probably take longer to finish. And to a person who could read the finished product meaningfully, something about the writing would look off — just a dash of that weird and offputting unnaturalness that characterizes first generation AI’s attempts at written human language on signs, enough to cause an uncanny valley effect. There would doubtless be errors due to incorrect judgement of ambiguous glyphs, which would carry over and accumulate in subsequent generations of hand copying. Worst case scenario, I ween this error rate could be so lossy, even after a single iteration, as to make much of the information the document contains irretrievable to anyone without access to the master copy.
TL;DR: If money was no object to me, could I just rock up to a scriptorium in Nottingham in 1400, throw an Armenian codex and a bag of gold on the table, and said “Three copies of this by next month, please”? And would a native Armenian speaker and reader find the products of such a publishing venture much use?
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - Jorge_Stolfi - 02-12-2025
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - oaken - 07-12-2025
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - LisaFaginDavis - 07-12-2025
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - Jorge_Stolfi - 07-12-2025
RE: How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? - oaken - 08-12-2025