30-04-2021, 01:50 AM
No need to apologize, no offense taken. 
You make a good point, which is really the common refrain in VMs studies: such little context. Because that’s the thing: without enough firm connections to other pieces of culture, the odds of anyone retrieving any information from the VMs’ text that the author deliberately put there are vanishingly small. For a crude analogy, it’s the difference between solving an unwitnessed murder when there are probable motives and perpetrators identified, versus solving an unwitnessed murder where no one can offer any probable reason anyone would want to kill the victim. Which doesn’t mean these kinds of cases like are never solved, by someone acting on a fanciful hunch. But that’s very much the exception, not the rule.
The problem with looking for patterns in the VMs’ text is that we don’t even know what kind of information we’re looking for. And so far none of anyone’s guesses about what this information might be have led us anywhere. I can see the point of coming up with a hunch, and filtering your looks at the VMs through those hunches. What I’m afraid I miss the point of, is continuing to view the VMs through those same hunches, when the manuscript doesn’t start making a lot more sense pretty quickly.
If you just enjoy the exercise of fleshing out these quite possible but nearly unprovable connect-the-dots scenarios, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that if it makes you happy, and I’m sure you would find a receptive audience for this online, if you wanted one, albeit likely a different audience than Voynicheros primarily focused on solving the mystery. I wonder if you might enjoy writing a piece of hard science fiction about someone solving the VMs, or some similar kind of worldbuilding/ conlanging artistic project. Just a thought.
You make a good point, which is really the common refrain in VMs studies: such little context. Because that’s the thing: without enough firm connections to other pieces of culture, the odds of anyone retrieving any information from the VMs’ text that the author deliberately put there are vanishingly small. For a crude analogy, it’s the difference between solving an unwitnessed murder when there are probable motives and perpetrators identified, versus solving an unwitnessed murder where no one can offer any probable reason anyone would want to kill the victim. Which doesn’t mean these kinds of cases like are never solved, by someone acting on a fanciful hunch. But that’s very much the exception, not the rule.
The problem with looking for patterns in the VMs’ text is that we don’t even know what kind of information we’re looking for. And so far none of anyone’s guesses about what this information might be have led us anywhere. I can see the point of coming up with a hunch, and filtering your looks at the VMs through those hunches. What I’m afraid I miss the point of, is continuing to view the VMs through those same hunches, when the manuscript doesn’t start making a lot more sense pretty quickly.
If you just enjoy the exercise of fleshing out these quite possible but nearly unprovable connect-the-dots scenarios, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that if it makes you happy, and I’m sure you would find a receptive audience for this online, if you wanted one, albeit likely a different audience than Voynicheros primarily focused on solving the mystery. I wonder if you might enjoy writing a piece of hard science fiction about someone solving the VMs, or some similar kind of worldbuilding/ conlanging artistic project. Just a thought.