[split] Humanist handwriting in the MS?

[Antonio García Jiménez]

JKP, I esteem very much your work but always I read about Latin o any other language in relation with the Voynich, I ask to myself the same: why so many learned men in the Court of Rodolphe II don't discover any language in the XVII century? They was more used to manuscripts, scribal conventions, ligatures, letter shapes, etc, etc. They was as puzzled as we are, but their background was infinitely bigger.

[Anton]

Indeed, that's a big question (as I also recently noted in another thread). Could that be attributed to the corrupting influence of book printing? Did they really study manuscripts as much as printed books? I remember reading about Trithemius complaining that handwriting gives away under the pressure of the print.

[-JKP-]

JKP, I esteem very much your work but always I read about Latin o any other language in relation with the Voynich, I ask to myself the same: why so many learned men in the Court of Rodolphe II don't discover any language in the XVII century? They was more used to manuscripts, scribal conventions, ligatures, letter shapes, etc, etc. They was as puzzled as we are, but their background was infinitely bigger.

I am not talking about the Latin language. I have never said that the Voynich text is the Latin language. It might be and it might not.

The Latin ALPHABET and Latin SCRIBAL CONVENTIONS, including abbreviations, ligatures, numbers, etc., are used in many languages (French, German, Latin, Czech, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, etc.) and these shapes and conventions are strongly evident in the shape of the VMS glyphs.

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I believe it DOES matter to identify these similarities because it provides information on the cultural exposure of whoever designed the Voynich text, and it also aids in determining which variations in shapes might be embellishments or simple differences in the movement of the pen and which variations might be meaningful.

I see strong evidence in the text that certain variations in VMS glyphs echo meaningful variations in Latin scribal conventions. I also see strong evidence that the location of these scribal conventions within VMS tokens follow conventions in medieval languages that used Latin characters.

[Anton]

The Latin ALPHABET and Latin SCRIBAL CONVENTIONS, including abbreviations, ligatures, numbers, etc., are used in many languages (French, German, Latin, Czech, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, etc.) and these shapes and conventions are strongly evident in the shape of the VMS glyphs.

That's the matter of script, not the matter of language. How could Marcis and Kirchers think about Voynichese as something coptic or something, if the scribal conventions are that apparent?

[-JKP-]

The Latin ALPHABET and Latin SCRIBAL CONVENTIONS, including abbreviations, ligatures, numbers, etc., are used in many languages (French, German, Latin, Czech, Italian, Spanish, English, Scandinavian, etc.) and these shapes and conventions are strongly evident in the shape of the VMS glyphs.

That's the matter of script, not the matter of language. How could Marcis and Kirchers think about Voynichese as something coptic or something, if the scribal conventions are that apparent?

I've looked at the communications (although it's a while ago) and IF I remember correctly, they did not say Coptic, they said hieroglyphics. Now, in modern parlance, we use the term "hieroglyphics" to specifically mean Egyptian pictographic characters, whereas from what I can tell from reading medieval manuscripts, the word "hieroglyphics" was a more general term in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance for a variety of unfamiliar texts (not specifically or only Egyptian pictographic text)

Even if they said Coptic, Coptic did not mean pictographic (Egyptian) text, in the middle ages, I'm pretty sure even then it meant Egyptian written with Greek letters. Many of the Latin scribal conventions are direct descendants of Greek scribal conventions, some of them are identical, in fact, and a few of the VMS characters may be directly from Greek. So... even if the characters are primarily Latin (which they are, I don't even understand why there is argument about it), if Kircher and his buddies couldn't immediately READ the Latin glyphs (with Latin being a language they knew very well) and, since there are a few Greek conventions in VMS glyphs, they may have assumed it was a script (in their terms, a "hieroglyphic") from that general part of the world (e.g., southeast Mediterranean).