116v

[-JKP-]

I'm about to post something that will probably be rejected at first glance, but please... give this some thought...


I have been looking You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and I suddenly noticed something...

Okay... look at portas/portad. There's not much disagreement that the first letters are porta and look at the way the "p" is written. It's not unusual. The stem is almost completely disconnected from the loop. Not unusual at all—I have many similar samples. The letter "p" was often written this way. Sometimes the loop is completely disconnected as in this one, and sometimes only the top part of the loop is disconnected.


All right, now look UNDER the bottom line of text. This is important...

Notice that under the VMS glyphs there is a "scrubbed" look. I never paid much attention to this before, I sort of noticed it, but didn't register its importance.

Okay... now, notice how the tail of the 9 (EVA-y) at the end of the VMS vord has almost been wiped out. It looks like it had a long curved tail, but half of it is almost invisible.

Now... an important digression. I have been collecting samples for almost three years. I have looked through more than 4,000 manuscripts and out of those I have only found about 500 that bear any overall resemblance to the VMS marginal text. One thing that stands out in sample after sample is that no one who uses Gothic cursive script that comes from the same tradition as the other letter shapes in the marginalia writes a "v" or "u" the way it is written here with that extra curve on the bottom combined with the other shapes. So I've been assuming that this person simply has a unique, eccentric way of writing this letter.

And then I noticed, the "v" in val8en may not be a "v" at all. Look at it. Look at the "p" in porta8, now look how there is a ghost of an ascender underneath the "val8en" p that looks like it's been wiped away. These might not be "v" letters at all. Look at the "v" in "vix". That is a conventional "v". That's a commonplace way to write it and it does not match the ones on the last line.


Is it possible that val8en isn't val8en at all, but possibly pal8en? If those two strange-looking "v" letters had descenders, then they are quite normal, conventional "p" letters in both angle and shape.

I wouldn't have questioned that they were u/v for an instant until I had collected more than 500 sample alphabets and was unable to find a match for the u/v and then it struck me, when I noticed the scrubbed part, that the interpretation of these letters could be wrong.


It would be nice to have confirmation from the text as to the meaning of the words if indeed one or both of those are the letter "p", but it doesn't really help much. It's just as cryptic as before. Now... if those "p" shapes had a small vertical line on the descender that's almost wiped out, it could make a difference, because then you have the abbreviation for pre- or pro- (which are frequently at the beginnings of words) and the second word could be perbren (which is German for pearls) but...it seems unlikely that pearls would be mentioned in this context.

The first word is problematic because we don't really know what that figure-8 represents. It looks a bit like d or s, but we don't know that for sure. It does appear to stand for a consonant. It could be peralden/peralsen/peralden/proalden/palden/palsen, none of which makes much sense, or the 8 might be who-knows-what. It's not even 100% certain that's an "e". It's written differently from the other e letters. It almost looks like a VMS c with a tail except the tail is cut off and the "n" doesn't match well to the other n letters either. It's a truly odd combination of shapes at the end.



Anyway, take a look at the texture under the last line. Has something been wiped away underneath and are descenders wiped out as well? I'm constantly wishing I could look at the original with a microscope.