24-04-2022, 07:41 PM
The use of grammatical gender is the standard in many languages. English has lost a lot of that.
So, if a star is named with the Arabic word for 'tent', then the culturally assigned gender for that noun would affect the proposed 'gender' of the set of sidereal connections. Just like 'stella' is feminine, but 'der Stern' is masculine. Castor and Pollux and the few others are references to characters who are male - not to tents that might be grammatically masculine. On the other hand, there is no comparable list of stars named for female characters either.
It's another aspect of the question as to whether the VMs zodiac nymphs are just generic personifications of stars - or whether any of them have individual identities. Each one has a label, but is it a name with any meaning? And, for that matter, how is meaning to be transmitted in an illustration? Heraldry is a means of visual identification. And also consider how meaningful information might be distributed in the VMs pages. Is it equal in all locations? Or is it concentrated in certain places? Which places? And is meaning displayed plainly, so one simply falls over it? Or is something more required for a valid interpretation?
Now consider that a number of the *best* pages from the original VMs have been removed - because no one cuts up a manuscript to take the most worthless pages. And we examine what is left. Is it enough to find meaning? There seems to be meaning in some of the illustrations, at least.
So, if a star is named with the Arabic word for 'tent', then the culturally assigned gender for that noun would affect the proposed 'gender' of the set of sidereal connections. Just like 'stella' is feminine, but 'der Stern' is masculine. Castor and Pollux and the few others are references to characters who are male - not to tents that might be grammatically masculine. On the other hand, there is no comparable list of stars named for female characters either.
It's another aspect of the question as to whether the VMs zodiac nymphs are just generic personifications of stars - or whether any of them have individual identities. Each one has a label, but is it a name with any meaning? And, for that matter, how is meaning to be transmitted in an illustration? Heraldry is a means of visual identification. And also consider how meaningful information might be distributed in the VMs pages. Is it equal in all locations? Or is it concentrated in certain places? Which places? And is meaning displayed plainly, so one simply falls over it? Or is something more required for a valid interpretation?
Now consider that a number of the *best* pages from the original VMs have been removed - because no one cuts up a manuscript to take the most worthless pages. And we examine what is left. Is it enough to find meaning? There seems to be meaning in some of the illustrations, at least.