1. He hasn't read very extensively if he says, "Curiously, not one theory suggests a female hand."
I've said there's a possibility it's female many times and so have numerous others. I don't know if it is, but I almost always say "the illustrator" instead of "he" or "she" because I'm trying to remain gender-neutral about the author(s) until more is known.
2. I notice he didn't mention Nick Pelling's book. If one is researching the VMS for a university degree, and citing precedents, as he does in his introduction, Pelling's book should be on the list (never mind, he added it at the end).
3. Oh boy, now he's got me going... "The general consensus therefore seems to be that the code is unsolvable."
Absolute nonsense. If that were true, this forum wouldn't exist, there wouldn't be so many blogs explicitly devoted to the VMS, and there wouldn't be so many dozens of proposed solutions every year.
4. Also, while I agree that it might be book of healthful practices, I see no evidence that it's specifically geared toward "childbearing and the associated complications..." There are what look like many pregnancies (women were basically always pregnant in the middle ages, before birth control), but there is a conspicuous absence of children, and only a couple of possible references to the actual process of childbirth.
5. "So, perhaps most surprisingly, the manuscript is not written in code at all, but simply the contemporaneous alphabet and language of its time and place. Remarkably, this fact seems to have been hiding in plain sight all along." << This statement is pretty insulting to the many people who HAVE suggested that the VMS is not written in code. In fact, many avoid the word "cipher" because it has not been established that it is ciphered.
6. "However, the lack of punctuation marks in the manuscript also suggested that the symbols take different forms, so that punctuation is indicated in a unique way." Many scribes did not use punctuation.
7. On page 3, he suggests that a different glyph (he calls it a "form") is used for each letter depending on its position in the word. Thus, he posits several different glyphs for the letter a.
Those who have studied the entropy characteristics of the VMS will understand why a researcher making this statement must provide a considerable amount of evidence to back it up. How you are going to have enough glyphs for the rest of the alphabet if 4 VMS glyphs are used for "a" and 6 are used for "s". He also claims that this assumption helps reveal where the punctuation lies.
8. I'm going to skip the statements about punctuation.
9. Cheshire is claiming the repeated words are used to create a count (rather than writing a numeral). Considering that many old languages use letters for numerals (as in Roman numerals), I find this hard to believe.
10. The rest is a table of correspondences. It's not much different from the letters many people have assigned to VMS glyphs, with the most notable exceptions being EVA-q, EVA-d, EVA-F and the tail in "daiin". He assigns "r" to EVA-l and "s" to EVA-r, but I've seen others do that. So... nothing really new here.
11. I'm not sure what he means by "reverse of Spread 176. Right." but he refers to it as the "final page" and talks about it as though the text on 116v is part of the evolutionary process of the old script (as he sees it) in the main body of text. I'm quite sure it's not. It's Gothic cursive c. 1385 to c. 1520 and it is probably marginalia.
12. He explains the frequent repetition of certain glyph-combinations at the ends of words as "an apparent use of rhyming words to poetic effect". While I'm not discounting the possibility of rhyme (it was common in the Middle Ages), I don't think glyph repetitions that are excessive can be explained away by calling them rhymes.
Marco, now that I've read the paper all the way through, I can see why you brought up the issue of not matching images to labels. He asserts many words that are nouns, some of which would surely relate to the imagery, and yet these potential image-text correspondences are scarcely mentioned. Even when he does mention them (briefly, on page 19), he switches from Vulgar Latin and Romance languages to Croatian/Slovenian/Polish, as though he couldn't make any sense in it in his chosen language, Vulgar Latin, and so resorted to other languages to explain it (a bit like people who start anagraming when they can't make sense of the labels). Starting on p. 21, he mentions a few more diagrams, but he doesn't back up his interpretations, he simply says what he thinks they mean and comes up with some pretty strange not-quite-Latin translations.
I found it difficult to read beyond this. On almost every paragraph after this, he switches to other languages to try to explain the text. I understand that proto-languages lead to many others but this is treading on unsteady ground. Just as anagraming enables people to turn VMS into something that makes sense, but in a subjective way, picking and choosing from dozens of different languages is much the same thing... it's a rationalization unless specific justifications are demonstrated.
Is this part of a PhD thesis (or a side-note to the Vulgar Latin glossary PhD work)?
It needs more work, more specific explanations of the logic that leads to each conclusion, and more study of the way VMS glyphs and tokens relate to each other positionally and grammatically. Also, he states outright that the glyphs are proto-Italic, without sufficient evidence for this assertion.
I've said there's a possibility it's female many times and so have numerous others. I don't know if it is, but I almost always say "the illustrator" instead of "he" or "she" because I'm trying to remain gender-neutral about the author(s) until more is known.
2. I notice he didn't mention Nick Pelling's book. If one is researching the VMS for a university degree, and citing precedents, as he does in his introduction, Pelling's book should be on the list (never mind, he added it at the end).
3. Oh boy, now he's got me going... "The general consensus therefore seems to be that the code is unsolvable."
Absolute nonsense. If that were true, this forum wouldn't exist, there wouldn't be so many blogs explicitly devoted to the VMS, and there wouldn't be so many dozens of proposed solutions every year.
4. Also, while I agree that it might be book of healthful practices, I see no evidence that it's specifically geared toward "childbearing and the associated complications..." There are what look like many pregnancies (women were basically always pregnant in the middle ages, before birth control), but there is a conspicuous absence of children, and only a couple of possible references to the actual process of childbirth.
5. "So, perhaps most surprisingly, the manuscript is not written in code at all, but simply the contemporaneous alphabet and language of its time and place. Remarkably, this fact seems to have been hiding in plain sight all along." << This statement is pretty insulting to the many people who HAVE suggested that the VMS is not written in code. In fact, many avoid the word "cipher" because it has not been established that it is ciphered.
6. "However, the lack of punctuation marks in the manuscript also suggested that the symbols take different forms, so that punctuation is indicated in a unique way." Many scribes did not use punctuation.
7. On page 3, he suggests that a different glyph (he calls it a "form") is used for each letter depending on its position in the word. Thus, he posits several different glyphs for the letter a.
Those who have studied the entropy characteristics of the VMS will understand why a researcher making this statement must provide a considerable amount of evidence to back it up. How you are going to have enough glyphs for the rest of the alphabet if 4 VMS glyphs are used for "a" and 6 are used for "s". He also claims that this assumption helps reveal where the punctuation lies.
8. I'm going to skip the statements about punctuation.
9. Cheshire is claiming the repeated words are used to create a count (rather than writing a numeral). Considering that many old languages use letters for numerals (as in Roman numerals), I find this hard to believe.
10. The rest is a table of correspondences. It's not much different from the letters many people have assigned to VMS glyphs, with the most notable exceptions being EVA-q, EVA-d, EVA-F and the tail in "daiin". He assigns "r" to EVA-l and "s" to EVA-r, but I've seen others do that. So... nothing really new here.
11. I'm not sure what he means by "reverse of Spread 176. Right." but he refers to it as the "final page" and talks about it as though the text on 116v is part of the evolutionary process of the old script (as he sees it) in the main body of text. I'm quite sure it's not. It's Gothic cursive c. 1385 to c. 1520 and it is probably marginalia.
12. He explains the frequent repetition of certain glyph-combinations at the ends of words as "an apparent use of rhyming words to poetic effect". While I'm not discounting the possibility of rhyme (it was common in the Middle Ages), I don't think glyph repetitions that are excessive can be explained away by calling them rhymes.
Marco, now that I've read the paper all the way through, I can see why you brought up the issue of not matching images to labels. He asserts many words that are nouns, some of which would surely relate to the imagery, and yet these potential image-text correspondences are scarcely mentioned. Even when he does mention them (briefly, on page 19), he switches from Vulgar Latin and Romance languages to Croatian/Slovenian/Polish, as though he couldn't make any sense in it in his chosen language, Vulgar Latin, and so resorted to other languages to explain it (a bit like people who start anagraming when they can't make sense of the labels). Starting on p. 21, he mentions a few more diagrams, but he doesn't back up his interpretations, he simply says what he thinks they mean and comes up with some pretty strange not-quite-Latin translations.
I found it difficult to read beyond this. On almost every paragraph after this, he switches to other languages to try to explain the text. I understand that proto-languages lead to many others but this is treading on unsteady ground. Just as anagraming enables people to turn VMS into something that makes sense, but in a subjective way, picking and choosing from dozens of different languages is much the same thing... it's a rationalization unless specific justifications are demonstrated.
Is this part of a PhD thesis (or a side-note to the Vulgar Latin glossary PhD work)?
It needs more work, more specific explanations of the logic that leads to each conclusion, and more study of the way VMS glyphs and tokens relate to each other positionally and grammatically. Also, he states outright that the glyphs are proto-Italic, without sufficient evidence for this assertion.