Mark Knowles' theories of pharma and other labels

[Mark Knowles]

Mark, I've been trying to be patient and fair and to give you time to become more acquainted with medieval scribal conventions, but it still appears from your posts, and from your chart, that you are not familiar with medieval character sets.

You say that you have been patiently waiting for me to come to the acquaintance with the various scripts you refer to, so as to realise what you say is true. I have been patiently waiting for you to provide the evidence to support your assertion.

I think first of all it is worth acknowledging that despite what has been said your position differs from that of Rene and more specifically Lisa.

Rene says that the character set MAY have been influenced by medieval Latin characters/ligatures/abbreviations.

You say the character set comprises medieval Latin characters/ligatures/abbreviations. Though you in this statement have added some others, some which you have not mentioned before.

These are two quite different opinions. So Rene might be under the misapprehension that you share the same opinion, but you really don't. Tell me otherwise if you do. Or if Rene believes you both share the same opinion explain to me how that is the case.

You throw in Coptic, Slavic, Astrological, Greek and now Old Russian(Glatholitic? or do you include runes as well?) to your list. When you cast your net so wide in terms of different scripts your are bound to be more successful with finding matches.

This genuinely reminds me of Gerard Cheshire casting his net so wide in the influences origins of words in his proto-romance. You could consider listing scripts that you think they are unconnected to, it could be a shorter list.

There is something to be said for showing rather than telling. You state what you say are parallels for characters, but you don't show real examples of them in other manuscripts; that would be much more persuasive. When I have looked at the examples you give on your blog they are very limited and frequently poor matches. If these parallels are so apparent you should show examples as I have. (I note you have just posted on Greek characters, which I haven't studied yet, but it appears that you don't provide examples from other than the Voynich.)

Expecting me to be familiar with something that you don't seem familiar enough with to provide real examples from manuscripts is unreasonable. I shouldn't be expected to guess which symbols you believe are identical or related.