geoffreycaveney's Middle English theory

[geoffreycaveney]

Personal pronouns are not optional in Middle English, it's not Latin. But even if we interpret "young" as "the young one", there must be an article. Possibly also inflection like in modern German and Dutch: "jung, der Junge; jong, de jonge", but I do not know this for certain about Middle English. Either way, what you write makes no grammatical sense in any language, and this has nothing to do with a translation to Modern English.

I beg to differ. First of all, let's look at the two lines I have read and interpreted together:

"Spur soueth hotər : theiris son risəth o bimoueth"
"al-to siteth yong, hoting acme gatteething riteth"

We may read "son" as the subject not only of "riseth" and "bimoueth", but also of "siteth" at the beginning of the following line:

"theiris son riseth, o bimoueth, al-to siteth yong"

As for the article in "the young one", I believe I mentioned at some point previously in this thread that my current hypothesis is that the Middle English text of the Voynich ms was deliberately written without any articles. This was not my initial hypothesis, but one I arrived at after working through a few lines. In fact there is a tradition of such an abbreviated style of English: in more modern times it has been known as "headline English" or "telegram English", but it could just as well be considered more generally as "messenger English", using the absolute minimum of words necessary to convey the essential "headline" or "telegram" style message. 

In fact, the omission of articles is common in certain encrypted English text, specifically in order to make it more difficult to decipher by removing the most frequent words "the" and "a" from the encrypted text. The US Army Field Manual on "Basic Cryptanalysis" (1990) even discusses this possibility, providing a separate section on word and letter frequencies in "English telegram text" as distinct from regular English text. 

In the case of the "Yorkist cipher" that I hypothesize here, the indefinite article "a" was impossible in any case since the cipher omits the letter "a" entirely!! Once the cipher has gone that far, why not omit the definite article "the" as well?

Geoffrey