Thread for all discussion about "genuine/meaningless/fake" etc

[RenegadeHealer]

I think it's unlikely that there's any text next to the drawings that doesn't say anything.
Accordingly, I agree with bi3mw, not RenegadeHealer.

Fair enough. I'll readily admit that a never-linguistically-meaningful VMs has some good arguments against it. As René pointed out, both this and the linguistically-meaningful VMs each neatly explain certain mysterious features that the other struggles to account for. This is part of what makes the VMs a really, really good mystery. But we need much more information to be able to strongly favor the meaningless VMs over the meaningful VMs, or vice versa.

Just as an aside, my sense of normal business practices in the medieval European book industry might be wholly off the mark and anachronistic, a scribe filling in a pre-illustrated codex with meaningless symbols that look like language, is possible if, for example, a scriptorium had it laying around as an unfinished project from a commissioner who ran out of money or skipped town. but I could see a scriptorium being willing to sell an interested buyer an unfinished book — roughly illustrated but not yet marked up or written in — at a discount rate, for use practicing writing, or as a personal notebook or diary. In such case, the text and its meaning (or conspicuous lack thereof) could have absolutely jack to do with the drawings. But this is special pleading, so I'll stop.