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+--- Thread: [Transcription] Stephen Bax on marginalia (/thread-2097.html)
[Transcription] Stephen Bax on marginalia - Koen G - 16-09-2017
We started the interview with Stephen Bax on the subject of marginalia, so I thought I'd transcribe that already and put it here for discussion. This was not the main part of the interview, but still it was well 8 minutes into the video
[David] The most obvious question to ask a linguist revolves around the marginalia. As you know many attempts have been made to decipher these brief notes without any definite success, although it appears to be some form of medieval High German. Do you think there is enough text to be definite about a reading and what language is this pointing to?
[Stephen] Well I agree that the marginalia are very interesting. But of course they are secondary to the text. I think there isn't really enough to be conclusive and people have been trying for a long long time to work out what's going on, with some idea that there are Germanic elements in it, but also some Latin elements. For me one of the most convincing interpretations of the final page is that it possibly relates to some remedy related to goats and kidneys and so on. I find the attempt to explore it very interesting, but I think there is nothing really conclusive yet that we can draw from it.
[Koen] If you have marginalia in a "normal" manuscript, usually you kind of see what's going on, you can see if it's a Latin or a German sentence. But in the Voynich we have several bits of marginalia and all of the are problematic. Why would that be?
[Stephen] Again I would like to place this in a multilingual framework. If you look at some old manuscripts, I'm thinking about the Vienna Dioscorides which is a fantastic ancient herbal, if you look at the marginalia in that, it's very multilingual. You have some in Hebrew, some in Latin, some in Arabic; it's a manuscript that's been passed around the world and studied very closely by different scholars who have written things in their own note form, their own language or their own dialect. For me the Voynich fits that perfectly. You've got even the month names which seem to be written in a form of old French. Obviously somebody with their own language was looking at the manuscript and decided to write in what he or she thought were the symbols for the Zodiac depictions. And therefor they wrote in their own dialect. Then you have other people who added certain things in German, other things in Latin.
Now I think the most intriguing thing is the last page, where somebody's attempted to write several lines of script. I agree with your implication, Koen, that it's a bit surprising that we can't even make much of that because you would expect it to be several lines of text in a language that we could identify. But it does seem to be in note form and you got the interesting + signs between some of the words. It does seem to be a mixture of some sort of Latin and some Germanic elements too. Most intriguing for me about that last page is that there are definitely two words of Voynich script within the text. That is significant because it implies that is was somebody who could actually understand the Voynich script and the language behind it, who was trying to write, as I see it, some sort of recipe or remedy of some sort. But they actually referred to Voynich words using Voynich script as well. Okay, it could be a hoax, you never know, but that is an interesting mixture of languages. Again, we must understand that many medieval scholars were multilingual and could switch easily from one language, say German, to a language such as Latin which was more readily understood elsewhere. And if we take that text to be notes from a scholar who knew several languages and also could read the Voynich script and language, then it becomes a very intriguing text. But as you hint in the beginning, we can't even decipher even that with any great certainty.
[Koen] Exactly. Now in your answer you mention the month names that have been written roundels. Some people say It's a northern French dialect, other people say it's Occitan, which is on the other side of France. The difference is crucial between those two. Do you think it would be possible to pinpoint the location given the few words that we have?
[Stephen] I have actually, some time ago, put something on my blog about that and I did investigate briefly some of the origins of the words. For me the most convincing is that it seems to be from a southern French and maybe Occitan dialect, but it's not entirely consistent. One thing I've emphasized on my blog is the issue of language variation. We have to expect that in that period there was a huge amount of variation not only in the way that people spoke, but in the way that they wrote. So for me, the debate over whether it's northern or southern French doesn't seem particularly important. If I were pushed I'd say it's closer to Occitan/ southern French, but that in itself doesn't get us very far because it could have been an Occitan speaker who was living, for example, as a monk in Austria, or in Italy or in Istanbul. It doesn't give us much information as to where the VM was at any particular point in time. So although it's interesting and intriguing, It won't take us very far in understanding where the VM itself came from, or any details of the script or language of the text. For me that's another good reason to say that the VM is an authentic medieval MS which travelled around a lot.
[Koen] It's been used.
[Stephen] Exactly, it's been used, rather than say being a modern hoax.
[Koen] Right. And even if we could find an exact match on the location, it could only tell us where the MS went after it was made and we still wouldn't know for sure if it was made in that location.
[Stephen] No, but equally it might only tell us where the writer of those words came from, and maybe if the manuscript had stayed fixed in one place and the writer was a visitor from another part who came to write in his own language. So it doesn't really help us that much, although again it's one of the fantastic fascinations of the MS.