05-07-2015, 01:55 PM
DavidJackson wrote:It is entirely possible that the text next to each plant is actually a little story that has nothing to do with medicine.
Yes that's possible, but that's less probable. So it makes sense to investigate the more probable options first, and then, if no results, to move to less probable ones.
DavidJackson wrote:The name of the plant will either be its common Latin name which we know from herbals. Or it will be a local vernacular. If it were a Latin name then we could assume the text is describing the use of the plant in the same fashion as other herbals. But it doesn't look like it, So if it's a local vernacular... we're lost, because we don't even know in which language or area to start looking.
Yes, for sure this is no way to direct decipherment, but this is at least some reasonable way to detect semantic patterns and correlations which might aid to decipherment.