(18-07-2016, 06:26 AM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP - yes, if we want to assume it is a Germanic dialect and such a sentence is intended, we must also assume a non-native speaker. Which makes me wonder: is that word order even found in Indo-European languages? Maybe Latin? Though that would assume a native speaker of Latin I guess, so a new problem.
Also, aren't marginalia generally in a language the maker is comfortable with? Indeed, marginalia are often a source for information about the copyists' native language instead of the Latin of the main text...
Yes, as far as I've seen, marginalia tend to be in a language that's comfortable for the person who's writing, but what if the marginal writer were contemporary with the VMS scribe... that person might choose to annotate in a common language, even if it were not the native tongue of the VMS scribe or the marginal scribe.
I had some interesting experiences while traveling through eastern Europe. Some of our conversations went through three or four people (and languages) in order for an idea to be conveyed. We couldn't speak directly to each other in our native tongues but we could get an idea across in a language we had in common.
I don't know if the marginalia and main text are from the same time period, but the marginal text is a flavor of Gothic Cursive, which was particularly common in the late 14th and 15th centuries, so it's possible that they lived at the same time. When you further look at how the marginal text and images on that page (and the Voynichese text) seem to have at least some spatial relationship to each other, it strengthens the possibility that the VMS scribes (there were at least two, as far as I can tell from the main text) and the marginalia writer MAY have been contemporaries.