[split] Humanist handwriting in the MS?

[-JKP-]

Can you really trace the whole set to Latin scribal habits?

That's what I also thought of yesterday - it makes sense to comprise a list of "Latin-derived" Voynichese glyphs. This may suggest the "basic" or "fundamental" characters of the Voynichese alphabet, in contrast to other ones which - being rare or altogether non-existent in Latin scripts - would appear as "additional" or "secondary". This would be in contrast to the Curve-Line System approach which tries to do the same thing but from the perspective purely visual.

I've been trying to do that in my blogs, but each character takes a whole blog (or most of one) because most people are not familiar with the abbreviations and ligatures and how they can be combined in a multitude of ways. I've also made lists, both here and on Nick's blog, but I tend to get ignored when I do that... it seems that certain people disbelieve me even more if I don't include illustrations.


The problem is, Latin scribal conventions aren't just a list of shapes that you can write out like an alphabet, it is a system, like Lego blocks, where you can take certain combinations apart and re-combine them in different ways (that's why the full version of Cappelli is so long and it doesn't even begin to include all of them).

Also, what they mean is context-sensitive. The EVA-y character, in Latin, has a dozen meanings, five common meanings, and a number of less common ones. AND Latin EVA-y can be combined with other abbreviations, to extend it. For example, EVA-m is a very common Latin abbreviation (-ris/-tis/-cis), but you can take the two parts apart and add the end part to EVA-y and it is a completely valid construction in Latin. If one doesn't understand this, then one wouldn't recognize how often it happens in the VMS.


I have been trying to write it up for over three years, and it's not a trivial explanation. I will try this evening to put together a summary. It makes sense for me to do it since I have thousands of examples from actual manuscripts and I have them organized by their [relative] meanings so that I can pull out samples in minutes. It's the explanation, the write-up, that is time-consuming.