-JKP- > 07-04-2018, 05:45 AM
(07-04-2018, 04:06 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Now back to page 116v. Immediately to the right of mur: Is that, or is that not, the Latin letter g?
Morten St. George > 07-04-2018, 08:14 PM
(07-04-2018, 05:29 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:"Isn't Maria a religious name in Italian? I sure hope you're not reverting back to authorship by the northern monks?
I think you handwriting experts are suffering from optical illusions. Let's try an experiment. Let's remove the word mature from all its surroundings and show it to people. I'm pretty sure many or most people would identify that central plus sign (+) as the letter t. Your judgment is being distorted by the surrounding plus signs and you don't realize it."
There's no way a contemporary viewer can accurately read medieval text unless they've had practice reading (or at least studying) old manuscripts. My judgment is tempered by many years study and practice, so I'll trust my judgment over a bunch of random people who probably can't read even read 16th-century script, much less the more difficult 15th-century script.
That is not a "t". It's a cross that's been inserted. If the text on the last page is an incantation or prayer, the cross symbol means you genuflect at those points while reading it out loud.
I don't know how you can say my judgment is being distorted when I've paged through thousands of medieval texts and have read many medieval manuscripts that are in Middle English, French, German, Nordic, and Latin. I can even kind of get the gist of some of the Russian, Italian, and Spanish texts, not much, but enough to get a sense of what they are about. Unfortunately, I don't know any Czech or Turkish (except for a few words) and my Greek is limited to reading titles, mythical names and names of plants, but Greek is a different character set anyway and doesn't apply to the style of script on 116v.
Morten St. George > 07-04-2018, 08:54 PM
Morten St. George > 07-04-2018, 09:31 PM
(07-04-2018, 05:45 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(07-04-2018, 04:06 AM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Now back to page 116v. Immediately to the right of mur: Is that, or is that not, the Latin letter g?
It's doesn't say "mur". It says so nim gas (or gaf) mich. Note that the "i" has a leading serif, just as it does elsewhere on this folio.
In fractured German that can be interpreted a number of ways (there are long threads about this).
One can't really tell if it's "gas" or "gaf" (gave) because there is a scrape in the parchment that goes down through the top stem and the spot where the crossbar for the "f" would be. It could be either "s" or "f". And note that this is a medieval "s". It is called a long-s.
-JKP- > 07-04-2018, 10:46 PM
-JKP- > 08-04-2018, 09:11 AM
Morten St. George > 08-04-2018, 04:43 PM
(08-04-2018, 09:11 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are 14 crosses. They are all drawn pretty much the same way.
In the second line (the one that starts "anchiton" and includes "portas") there are two unambiguous "t" characters (and possibly a couple more than are not as clearly written). Notice how the "t" has a curved foot. I don't know how you can insist the cross in "ma+ria" is a "t" when it looks like the other crosses and does not look like the other tees.
Morten St. George > 08-04-2018, 04:50 PM
(07-04-2018, 10:46 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I suggest you read the threads on this. This specific phrase is closer to German (or old Yiddish) than any other language.
so is German (it's similar to "so" in English)
nim is German (this was a common way to spell it in certain areas in the Middle Ages, now it is spelled nimm and means to take)
gaf means gave in lowland Medieval German, gas can have a number of interpretations, one being "goose"
mich is "me/to me" in German. Some have also suggested it might be short for "milch" for "milk" in German and that is reasonable as consonants were sometimes dropped from words if the word was pronounced that way.
In other words, depending on how gas/gaf is interpreted (as "f" or as "s") it might mean he gave it to me to take (in corrupted grammar typical of a foreign speaker), or so take goose milk (which might be a remedy connected with an incantation).
If it were perfect German, it would have been interpreted as soon as Voynich laid his hands on it, he probably knew German from all his travels, because it is imperfect, we have a mystery to solve. For your information, the official language of the Holy Roman Empire at that time was German, so a lot of people from other areas were in a situation where they had to learn it even if they weren't good at languages, and especially if they didn't know Latin (or didn't know Latin very well).
The text on the first line also shows signs of possibly being German, although I have blogged about other possibilities, but it's hard to deny that the "-pfer" at the end of the line is German, since other languages rarely combine p and f. The second line is more similar to Romance languages, the third is more similar to Latin (some of the words are Latin).
Note that the "i" has a leading serif like the other "i" letters on this folio.
For the record, I can read both French and German (I know French better than German).
Morten St. George > 08-04-2018, 05:13 PM
-JKP- > 08-04-2018, 07:19 PM
(08-04-2018, 04:50 PM)Morten St. George Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Just because all the great handwriting experts of the past say it's nim does not mean that you have to follow in their folly. We are very fortunate that Shakespeare decided to help out by giving us "ubren" because the shape of that n doesn't even remotely resemble what could be the first letter of mur, so that word couldn't possibly be nim! As I have been saying, the dot above mur is just a stray dot like the dot you see down below the letter u. Meanwhile, the ending upswing on the final r faded away as it almost did for the r in ubren. It's a WALL, silly.