04-01-2017, 10:15 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-01-2017, 05:14 PM by -JKP-.
Edit Reason: parchment = regular parchment
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(04-01-2017, 08:07 PM)davidjackson wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Let us get into a personal argument about why an action was not taken, please.
Jkp has established that Wolfgang 99 has not used his system to translate any substantial portion of the text and Wolfgang 99 has given his reasons. Let us concentrate on the method, not the implementation.
The theory assumes a level of skill and a level of scale that are not practical in a small manuscript with a rough surface.
Vellum is generally smoother than regular parchment, it's a finer texture, but it's still rough enough that the pen will stutter as it crosses certain portions and tiny amounts of ink will pool in the fissures and pores. The pooling and scumbling can be seen in some of the portions that are painted and the pen stutters can be seen in the high-resolution scans.
Wolfgang is proposing that tiny portions of each glyph are so finely tuned that the shape and angle of each micro-portion varies enough to represent four different recognizable sets of letters/words/phrases. Some of the VMS glyphs are only 1/32nd of an inch in width. For that letter to contain three, four, or more micro-portions supposes that the scribes, who were not expert penmen, could control angles and shapes down to less than 1/64th of an inch in an era where people didn't have eyeglasses, reading lenses were primitive and hard to get, and smooth writing surfaces, like calendered paper, didn't exist.
I said at the beginning that I think it's a cool idea, but I see no evidence in the script that there was any effort to control the individual curves in each glyph in a way intended to convey meanings. I spent a great deal of time studying the script and the variations in pen are normal and natural when compared to other less formal manuscripts and do not show signs of having an embedded subtext in the shapes.
To say that a straight-9 might mean something different from a curved-9 is certainly possible—but to say that there are 4 or 5 letters/phrases (multiplied by four different stencils) incorporated into a single 9 glyph at such a tiny scale needs further substantiation.