Quote:one of the first papers I see with a clear methodology and translations that make some sense

• They say this is vulgar Latin influenced by modern Italian (which is problematic in itself) and then they identify one of the rarest characters in the VMS as the letter "x" even though the letter "x" is extremely common in Latin.
  
• They've identified y as "in/un/nu". This makes no sense. Why would a huge proportion of Latin words end in "in/un/nu"? The common endings in Latin were us/um/em and several others. The authors have paid no attention to Latin grammar-endings or letter frequency (or bicharacter frequency).
  
• In their transliteration system there are quite a few common Latin letters missing.
  

• They transliterated a loop on the upper right as "e", always referring back to Tironian notes in their comments. This is not Tironian notes or Latin, which means the authors don't understand the lineage of these scribal conventions. Tironian notes "e" usually corresponds to an arrow-head shape (or sometimes an s-shape). Rather than being Tironian notes, the upper-right loop is a very common Greek scribal convention for the abbreviation "e" (it could also stand for "o"). In Latin, the small loop top-right means something different from what the authors suggest. Latin scribes adapted the Greek idea but gave it a different meaning. In Latin, it's typically the "-is" suffix (as in -ris/-tis/-cis) and sometimes "-em" (although there was also a more common abbrev. for "-em".
  

• The authors translated 6 + 6 star-names on f68r1 and f68r2. But the translations are subjective, as the authors variously interpreted y as "n", "s", "nu" or  "un", and e as whatever vowel they needed to create a valid or semi-valid word. They also added non-existent letters if they needed them. For example, laoades was interpreted as el aoades and then translated as al'owaid. Notice how many changes it took to get from laoades to al'owaid.
  
• Similarly they translated "cinu" as "cignus" adding in two letters that aren't there to basically force it to work.
  
• The authors assign many different interpretations to y and they ignore it when it doesn't suit them, often dropping it entirely.
  

• On the identification of Viola (which is also known as "ion") they selected the second word on the fifth line as the plant name. They claim that cheey is "ion" but give no explanation as to why the name of the plant would be buried in the text or why this word occurs on many plant folios, or why it also occurs in the numerous cosmology drawings, in green Aries, Taurus, Leo, Virgo, numerous times on Scorpio, in some of the pool pages, and twice on the f68r1 star chart.
  Yes, the medievals believed that stars were connected to everything (including plants), but viola was actually a somewhat minor plant... it was not included in all the medieval herbals and when it was, it was usually Viola odorata, not the ones that look like Viola tricolor. When word (or plant) identifications are given, you can't just pick out one word on a folio and not look at where it occurs in the rest of the manuscript.
  
• They identified Plant 15r as Cichorium based on picking out a mid-paragraph word that transliterates to çicure. The plant does not look like Cichorium unless you ignore the long calyx, ignore the leaves and ignore the shape of the stalk. The VMS illustrator could draw better than that. This is a very questionable ID.
  
• I agree that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. might be nightshade, it's one of the better drawings and LOOKS like nightshade (it also looks like Hypericon), so I'm not going to argue with the proposed ID, but the authors subjectively turned arien edie secaedn into are seca and even if this were a correct translation, it could apply to many plants and doesn't specifically identify nightshade. They also don't explain why someone writing in Latin would write like this: "Aequare, et adure seselio iure piare ure". Those who can read Latin will see right away what is wrong with this.
  

• pick out tokens that almost work with the chosen system,
  
• allow multiple subjective interpretations of individual letters,
  
• subjectively change them a bit to make them work if they don't quite fit the system (including interpretation in a different language),
  
• ignore letter-frequency-distribution in the chosen language,
  
• ignore spelling in words that are usually spelled consistently (even in medieval times, some words were mostly spelled in the same way),
  
• ignore grammar in the chosen language (Latin endings, which are extremely important to grammatical interpretation, are almost completely absent in this translation), and
  
• ignore the context and all the rest of the text that doesn't work according to the system.
  

(11-07-2019, 03:50 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Deure is not Latin.