08-02-2016, 12:52 AM
JKP:
I agree. If it were that easy, and written in a well-known language, it would have been solved long ago. I wasn't actually saying the VMS is in Latin, just using it as an example of a highly inflected language.
So you mean a codebook? That wold also be possible, and essentially the same as an artificial language. Which would of course make it essentially impossible to decipher without the codebook.
I didn't know there were that many Tironian notes. However, the VMS appears to have a much smaller number of distinct glyphs. As you wrote on your blog, several of them look like common medieval abbreviations. Others look like ordinary Latin letters or Arabic numerals. Could it be that the VMS was written by a person who could not read Latin, but got their hands on some Latin MS and created their own alphabet based on the symbols they found there without understanding their original meaning? Either to create a meaningless imitation of text or for recording their own language (or an invented one), similar to how Sequoyah created the Cherokee script based on English letters whose meaning he did not know.
Wladimir:
Thanks for the compilation. Most of these are indeed very similar to the herbal pages. For those that have labels, I haven't found those words again on the respective herbal pages. Your idea that the labels represent instructions on what part of the plant to use is also possible, but many label words are unique within the MS and I don't think this would be expected under that theory.
Quote:In other words, these two approaches have probably been tried tens of thousands of times by historic persons and amateur Internet cryptographers.
I agree. If it were that easy, and written in a well-known language, it would have been solved long ago. I wasn't actually saying the VMS is in Latin, just using it as an example of a highly inflected language.
Quote:And no one has succeeded even though the VMS is packed full of "labels" in different contexts (plants, pharma, astrology/astronomy, balneological, etc). That tells me they might not be labels in the traditional sense or that they are encoded in a unique way—perhaps in a way that requires a second document as a lookup tool.
So you mean a codebook? That wold also be possible, and essentially the same as an artificial language. Which would of course make it essentially impossible to decipher without the codebook.
Quote:I don't know if you've ever looked at medieval documents describing Tyrolean notes. I don't mean the ones that show a chart of a couple of hundred characters, I mean the manuscript that is hundreds of pages long with thousands and thousands of symbols to represent each word or long syllable.
I didn't know there were that many Tironian notes. However, the VMS appears to have a much smaller number of distinct glyphs. As you wrote on your blog, several of them look like common medieval abbreviations. Others look like ordinary Latin letters or Arabic numerals. Could it be that the VMS was written by a person who could not read Latin, but got their hands on some Latin MS and created their own alphabet based on the symbols they found there without understanding their original meaning? Either to create a meaningless imitation of text or for recording their own language (or an invented one), similar to how Sequoyah created the Cherokee script based on English letters whose meaning he did not know.
Wladimir:
Quote:In my view, the labels near the simplified drawings of plants means ingredients that are taken from this particular plant. This is a very agrees well with the method of my translation.
Thanks for the compilation. Most of these are indeed very similar to the herbal pages. For those that have labels, I haven't found those words again on the respective herbal pages. Your idea that the labels represent instructions on what part of the plant to use is also possible, but many label words are unique within the MS and I don't think this would be expected under that theory.