Substituting b for p is something I see in a very large number of manuscripts (puch for buch, perg for berg, poch for boch, etc). Very common, just as substitution a for e (ain, main, for ein, mein). I also frequently see nit for nicht in certain areas.
Substituting x for k/c is something I see in specific areas (not as common).
I frequently see Saxon spellings in manuscripts from southeast Germany and they are very consistent with many of the modern (and old) Scandinavian spellings. In fact, "gås" is Scandinavian for "goose" even today.
Quote:Koen: "I think it's easier to explain these as genitives rather than spelling variation of the nominative. For öch I would first check whether it's related to auch."
Scandinavian and German (and also English) are from Germanic roots. There's a lot of overlap. Many words are exactly the same, or they are the same, but the Scandinavian lacks the "-en" verb ending. Swedish/Danish/Norwegian are mutually intelligible by people with reasonably good language skills, and sometimes it's only the spelling that differs. In Danish "and" is
og and in Swedish it is
och. It's the same word, only the pronunciation and spelling differs, just as German dialect puch and German
buch are the same word with slightly different spelling and pronunciation. But German and Scandinavian are also different enough that it's noticeable when a Scandinavian verb form is used instead of German.
Actually, the word och consistently uses a triangular letter rather than the usual way he writes "o" or "a". I notice art/ort is also written with this same triangular vowel. So now I'm not sure whether he means "o" or "a". I'll have to read through the rest to see which one it represents. Hmm, now I'm not sure. He uses the triangle shape for "oder" but also for "ein", so it seems to be an almost generic substitution (at the beginnings of words) for vowels.
I notice he's using "pläu" for "blau", and "pûchsn" for buchsen (for the canon barrel) and often leaves out the apostrophe at the end.
...
I had the same question-mark in my head when I discovered a large number of Greek manuscripts in the libraries around Florence (along with many Greek words in Latin manuscripts), and wondered if the manuscripts were brought in from other areas or if they were created locally. I thought it might have some relevance to the VMS. Then I noticed many signatures in Greek handwriting in some of the local legal documents, which suggested the Greeks were local. I wanted to know why and discovered there were pockets of Greek colonists in the Veneto and Florence around the time the VMS was created.
When I looked into Greek immigrants in Lombardy and the Veneto, I found there was quite a bit of friction between the Greek orthodox and Catholic church in the late 14th and early 15th century, which they tried to resolve in the late 1430s, which is part of the reason there were so many documents signed in Greek handwriting. The immigrants may also account for the large number of Greek manuscripts (I still don't know if they created them locally or brought them in, but at least some were created locally).
On the same subject, when I was reading Bohemian manuscripts written in German, I came across a couple that left out vowels the same way the Czech language leaves out vowels. I can't remember if I screen-snapped them. Words that seem quite strange to westerners are not strange in Czech. There are quite a few Czech words with no vowels. When this same way of leaving out the vowels is applied to German, it comes out looking like modern text-speak. Or somthng lik ths in Englsh. So even though it was German, mostly, I had the feeling it was written by someone whose native language was Czech or one of the medieval Slavic languages.
And there's one more that particularly intrigued me since it reminded me of the text on 116v... I was reading a couple of manuscripts from the southeast of Switzerland (it's a while ago, but I think they were from Einseideln) which were a fascinating blend of old Latin, German, and Italian.