(25-07-2017, 09:11 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (24-07-2017, 10:11 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.orol dair does not bring anything immediately.
These words can simply mean "observer" or "eyewitness" in ancient Greek, if we read "ol" as "a".
Let's take a look at this. On your blog you offered this interpretation:
1. First you need to explain why you ignored the space between
orol and
dair. It's possible that the spaces need to be interpreted differently from the way they are laid down in the VMS, but you can't just add and remove them at your own convenience to create words—you have to give reasons for your choices.
orol appears a number of times in the VMS by itself, so it is possible it is meant to stand alone. In English you can't arbitrarily combine the words
prim and
rose to make
primrose because the "prim" part means something completely different when it is separated from "rose" (so does the "rose" part since primroses are neither prim nor are they related to roses). The same might be true of the VMS.
2. You have interpreted
ol as a biglyph. Okay, I've written that it might be a biglyph many times (I am not 100% certain this is so, but I think it's a possibility), so I won't argue this, but then you treat
or as two glyphs even though
or has all the same statistical biglyph-like properties as
ol. Again, you have to explain your choices if you inconsistently interpret glyphs and biglyphs.
3. Next you changed
oratain (
οραταιν) into
ορατεoν or
ορατηρ (visitor), altering the end, presumably to wrestle it into a valid word. If you had treated each glyph as a single glyph, you could just as easily have produced
ορεσταιν (orestain - "visible"). It does ignore the space, but it changes only one letter (the second "o"), and does not inconsistently treat mono- and bi- glyphs. This may not be a correct interpretation either, but it takes fewer liberties with the original VMS token than the two options that you provided.
4. Now you have to look at where else it occurs, and how often. If it means eyewitness or observer, as you have claimed, and it shows up frequently next to roots in the small plants section, for example, then you have to question whether it makes any sense in the manuscript as a whole.
Many people who claim to have translated parts of the manuscript leave out that one crucial step, which they should have taken before announcing their discoveries, which is testing whether the same "rules" for translating one or two words still WORK in the rest of the manuscript, or at least in the parts of the manuscript that are physically or contextually related to the parts they claim to have translated.
So...
If we take your system and apply it to a paragraph on the same page (f82r), what do we get?
You translated the first word as μaκτος (you wrote poultice, but it's my understanding this is closer to mucus than poultice and if the
ol were an "i" instead of "a" (both very common vowels in Greek), then it becomes the more common word μικτος), but... using
your letter designations, this is what happens:
(Note that the "-TOS" ending in Greek may seem valid at first glance, but it could just as easily be interpreted as -CUS, -CUM -TUM, or -RUM in Latin. Most languages have common endings. As examples, we have "-LY" and "-MENT" in English and French or -EN in German. Also notice that -TOS is unusually frequent and sometimes appears alone, which would not typically happen in Greek.)
I have not ruled out Greek as a possible underlying language (I have a list of about 9 languages that particularly interest me with relation to the VMS) but substitution codes in Greek, or any other language, do not generalize well to the rest of the manuscript, especially when you start looking at sentence structure, expected frequency, and context. There is something else going on here that is not typical of simple substitution codes, even if you allow a little leeway in interpreting endings (as is done in Latin).
Labels are only a starting point (and not necessarily the best one in the VMS). By themselves, it would be difficult to prove that a translation is coincidental or real.