From "decryption" to "translation"

[-JKP-]

It is of great interest whether there are inflexions in the VMS or there are none. I wonder if any method can be proposed to investigate that.

I strongly suspect that there are. For example, the suffix [-in] is very common in the ms, but it is almost entirely absent in any of the labels in the ms. This suggests to me that the suffix [-in] represents some type of inflexion that does not tend to occur in simple nominative case noun forms that tend to occur in labels of names of things.

That might seem like good logic if the labels are names, nouns, but if they were I suspect someone would have figured out at least a few of them, they've probably been studied more intensely than any other part of the text. I haven't been able to resolve them into names, at least not in a consistent way that works for a large portion of them.

I know the assumption is almost always that they are probably nouns, and being a fan of Occam's razor, it's the first thing I tried, years ago, but I really don't see why they have to be nouns. They could be instructions (verbs like pour, freeze, steep, bathe, crush, dry, etc.), or they could be quantities or references. A reference doesn't necessarily have to match anything in the text (be repeated), it could be a location in the text (e.g., folio 5 section 2). There are quite a few ways references could be formatted. If you look at Greek herbal manuscripts, they are often annotated this way, with [cross-]reference text next to each drawing.

It's also possible that VMS "labels" are part of a longer narrative, that they stretch over a section of images (more like a phrase or sentence rather than a list of nouns).


I try not to assume they are nouns, it's only one of a number of possibilities.