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• Veronese Riddle

  MarcoP > 31-08-2017, 02:34 PM

  The Veronese riddle (Italian: Indovinello Veronose) is a short marginal text dating to the 8th or early 9th century. Scholars variously consider this to be very corrupted Latin or one of the earliest texts written in Italian vulgar.
  
  The riddle is quite fun (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
  Voynich-wise, it's interesting that the riddle is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
  
  I found the script (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) impossible to read and interesting in itself. I attach three words from the short invocation that follows the riddle.
  Gratias tibi agimus (we thank you)
  
  
  PS: Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. can be seen online.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  Davidsch > 31-08-2017, 03:45 PM

  I've taken interest in this also, but quite some time back. I've looked up my (private) project and it says:
  
  Indovinello Veronese (detail), about A.D. 842
  Ink on parchment. Biblioteca Capitolare, Verona 
  Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, Cod. LXXXIX (84) ("Orazionale mozarabico"), fol. 3recto
  This is considered to be the oldest Italian handwritten document  in "Indovinello Veronese".
  
  
  What you took is beginning of line 3. But I've got a slight different transcript. 
  
  Trascrizione diplomatica
  
  1 ✝ separebabouesalbaprataliaaraba & albouersorioteneba & negrosemen
  2 seminaba
  3 ✝ gratiastibiagimusomnip(oten)ssempiterned(eu)s
  
  Interpretazione/interpretation
  
  Se pareba boves, alba pratàlia aràba
  et albo versòrio teneba, et negro sèmen seminaba
  
  Traduzione/translation
  Teneva davanti a sé i buoi, arava bianchi prati,
  e un bianco aratro teneva e un nero seme seminava
  
  [ENG]
  He held before him the oxen, plowing white meadows,
  and holding a white plow and sowing black seeds.
  
  ---
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to match the transcript with the text. 
  So, what I did is probably wrong, but I know I can show it to you without hesitation.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  -JKP- > 31-08-2017, 06:49 PM

  This is really cool, Marco, and I've never seen it before.
  
  Thank you for posting.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  MarcoP > 31-08-2017, 07:09 PM

  (31-08-2017, 06:49 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is really cool, Marco, and I've never seen it before.
  
  Thank you for posting.

  
  I am glad you find this interesting!
  The "a" looking like an "u" reminded me of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you blogged about. Both the Carolingian and Corsiva Nuova script have "a"s with an open top, but those in Carolingian look more like "cc".

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  Koen G > 31-08-2017, 07:32 PM

  Got to love how the "u" is not much more than a "-". If I were to transcribe this without knowing the script or contents it would surely lead to a loss of entropy

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  MarcoP > 31-08-2017, 07:47 PM

  
  
  Davidsch's matching of the transcribed text helps noticing other interesting features. E.g. "e" is often written "&", see for instance t&neba. In "sempiterne" the first "e" almost looks like an 8.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  -JKP- > 31-08-2017, 09:47 PM

  It's fascinating to see the development of the letters.
  
  Here the "s" looks more like an "r" but... then I remembered that some of the Carolingian esses and early proto-Gothic esses have a slight hook on the middle left, almost like an "f" (in fact, it's easy to mistake it for an "f" if it crosses the stem) and now I see why they were written that way—it was an evolutionary development from this earlier shape.
  
  
  
  Marco, I was interested in what you had to say about the Veneto dialect, so I looked at some more examples. I noticed that the "q" is often written without a following "u". That seems to be an older form also... In the past I've noticed "q" without "u" in some of the early medieval documents and also that many of the scribes who were using the "cc" shape for "a" (and also some that were using a more familiar "a") started putting a "cc" superscripted next to the "q" (where we would normally write "qu").
  
  So... if it was small and next to a "q" it represented a "u" rather than "a" which is interesting because it's almost as though the "u" was secondary, not as important, and yet by the 15th century, in most places, the "q" and "u" are written together, on the same line... except, apparently in some parts of the Veneto.
  
  Another thing you mentioned was the dropping of many of the doubled letters and I looked at another Veneto document and it was written in a similar way. That really reminded me of the VMS, where doubled letters are rare except for the "cc" (which I strongly suspect is a ligature rather than a doubled letter).

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  -JKP- > 31-08-2017, 11:36 PM

  I noticed a couple of people on the Web have translated the first word on the last line as gratiam and gratias, but the scribe doesn't write "t" like that. The "t" in "...talia..." has a distinctively long top bar, as does the one in "teneba".
  
     
  
  So it looks to me like this says g ra [ligature] ci [ligature] a s (gracias) with Spanish spelling (I learned yesterday that there are many Spanish words in the Veneto dialect so perhaps this also happened in old Italian), rather than gratiam/gratias.
  
  I know the next word has been interpreted as "tibi" which is what it would be in Latin, but this isn't strictly Latin, it's transitional between Italian and Latin and whatever dialects were used at the time. Is it possible this is also "c"? I'm not certain, but it's strange that a scribe would change a "t" that much, even if it's a ligature. The "e" ligature with the big swooped loop is not uncommon (they were still doing that in the 17th century), but that style of "t" usually retains the top bar even if combined with other letters.
  
  It would be nice to see a larger block of text to see how the "c" shape was written by this scribe.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  MarcoP > 01-09-2017, 08:24 AM

  (31-08-2017, 09:47 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, I was interested in what you had to say about the Veneto dialect, so I looked at some more examples. I noticed that the "q" is often written without a following "u". That seems to be an older form also... In the past I've noticed "q" without "u" in some of the early medieval documents and also that many of the scribes who were using the "cc" shape for "a" (and also some that were using a more familiar "a") started putting a "cc" superscripted next to the "q" (where we would normally write "qu").
  
  So... if it was small and next to a "q" it represented a "u" rather than "a" which is interesting because it's almost as though the "u" was secondary, not as important, and yet by the 15th century, in most places, the "q" and "u" are written together, on the same line... except, apparently in some parts of the Veneto.
  
  Another thing you mentioned was the dropping of many of the doubled letters and I looked at another Veneto document and it was written in a similar way. That really reminded me of the VMS, where doubled letters are rare except for the "cc" (which I strongly suspect is a ligature rather than a doubled letter).

  
  Hi JKP, I haven't seen enough documents to have an opinion about scribal practices typical of the Veneto area. 
  
  On the other hand, the fact that most double consonants are reduced to a single consonant is a feature of the Veneto dialect: double consonants represent different sounds that don't exist in that language. But the fact that there are no doubles in the riddle seems accidental: doubles are also absent in the modern Italian translation posted by Davidsch.
  
  

  (31-08-2017, 03:45 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Teneva davanti a sé i buoi, arava bianchi prati,
  e un bianco aratro teneva e un nero seme seminava

  
  About your other doubts ("tibi" etc.), the riddle is an important document which has been studied by a number of scholars. I am afraid I don't have the necessary level of competence to meaningfully add to their work.

• RE: Veronese Riddle

  -JKP- > 01-09-2017, 06:55 PM

  (01-09-2017, 08:24 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.About your other doubts ("tibi" etc.), the riddle is an important document which has been studied by a number of scholars. I am afraid I don't have the necessary level of competence to meaningfully add to their work.

  
  
  I could be completely wrong about it being "ci" rather than "ti" but it does look like "ci" to me and to follow conventions for writing "c" more than for "t". I find this detail of particular interest for the following reasons...
  
  
  
  Looking at this from a paleographic point of view, it would be very unusual to combine the letters t and i in that particular way in a document that has "t" with a distinctive crossbar (but without more text in this scribe's hand, it might forever be an open question).
  
  
  So, I gave some thought as to why someone might write "cibi" instead of the very prevalent "tibi" (which I've never seen spelled with anything other than a "t" so far) and it occurred to me that perhaps it was pronounced "tchibi" or "chibi" in that time and place, and I have seen "ch" written as only "c" in some manuscripts.
  
  
  
  
  So why would this detail (of whether it's ci or ti) matter on a Voynich forum?
  
  Well, first of all, the "ci" or "ti" and several other letter combinations in this fascinating historical riddle are ligatures. There are more ligatures than one usually sees in such a short chunk of text, and I strongly get the feeling that several VMS glyphs might be based on ligatures, at least in terms of their shapes.
  
  The "ci" or "ti" ligature in the riddle uses a long "i" with a descender. Look familiar?
  
  It's a two-part construction (a c-curve + descending line), but represents two letters. It's not exactly the same shape as EVA-y, but it is constructed similarly. In the VMS, y is positioned like the Latin "9" (abbreviation for con- com- -us -um), mostly at the ends, sometimes at the beginning, less often in the middle, but the way it is used in the VMS may not be related to the inspiration for the shape.
  
  Recently I posted on another thread a pic and question about whether EVA-d might also be a ligature, a combination of EVA-l + EVA-e. The gallows characters certainly resemble ligatures (EVA-k bears strong resemblance to the ligature for "It" which was a very common abbreviation for "Item").
  
  
  Latin was the first language I attempted to wrestle out of the VMS, because the VMS contains so many Latin glyphs and abbreviation conventions, but I never came up with anything that indicated that a sizable chunk of the VMS was in Latin. Many others have tried to translate it into Latin, both after I tried (with Lockerby being the most recent) and long before (I note on the Web that there are many references to it being Latin prior to 2003). It was, after all, the lingua franca at the time, and the VMS shapes are Latin, so it's logical to give it a try.
  
  
  But what I'm leading up to is this...
  
  When one attempts to translate the VMS into Latin, it's natural to interpret the "9" and other glyphs as they would be interpreted in medieval Latin and this is what most researchers have done (I won't include a list because pretty much everyone with a knowledge of Latin and even some who obviously don't know Latin have expanded these glyphs as if they were Latin abbreviations).
  
  But... (this is the important part)... if one looks at the glyphs as ligatures, rather than as abbreviations, one gets quite different results—the expansion for ligatures is handled in a different way.
  
  
  Using the Italian riddle ligature as an example...
  
  If you expand VMS y at the ends of words as it would be traditionally expanded as a Latin abbreviation, you most frequently get -us or -um.
  
  But, if you approach it differently and expand VMS y as it would be expanded from a ligature as in Old Italian script (which is similar to late Latin), the same shape might give you ti or ci or something else that differs from -us or -um.
  
  
  So, assuming the underlying language were Latin (not saying it is, just that it might be, and even if it isn't, the same reasoning applies), there are potentially two completely different interpretations of the same glyphs depending on whether they are interpreted as abbreviations or as ligatures.
  
  
  When you look at the letter "a" in Voynichese (which many people insist is a vowel but I'm not so certain this is true), one notices that there are many instances in which the curve is almost separated or is separated from the stem. Perhaps this too is a ligature rather than a letter, one that only looks like "a".
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