(19-01-2020, 09:27 PM)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- The VMS does not contain a secret writing, but a phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters
Linda and nablator, I agree that this statement is problematic, but not necessarily for the same reasons you do. I think it's just poorly worded. "Secret writing" is an imprecise term that begs for clarification. "A phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters" comes off as semantic wheel-spinning that doesn't say anything new or meaningful.
All letters in phonographic writing systems (alphabets, abjads, and syllabaries) are phonetic transcriptions of sounds, after all.
I have a hunch that what Ms. Davis is trying to say, is that the VMs' text is the result of a scribe simply echoing a speaker's speech in written form, with little to no consideration for what the speaker might have meant to say. In other words, the scribe was merely a scribe, not an editor or an interpreter. Think of a court stenographer or a medical interpreter, both of whom aim to simply echo what another person said, with as little of their effort evident in the finished product as possible. In the setting of a medieval manuscript, one possible scenario which would fit this model is that of a scribe attempting to record a spoken language (s)he didn't understand, especially a spoken language that had no tradition of being written.
As an exercise, go on YouTube and find a short video of one of the last speakers of a dying unwritten language, without subtitles. Try your hand at transcribing in Roman letters what you hear the speaker say. Then look up an official transcript of the same video, using either IPA or some systematic Romanization system that researchers of that language have devised. I bet you'll find that your transcription deviates markedly. Specifically, I think you'll find that your transcription misses important phonological distinctions that you're not used to hearing in your native language. A native speaker of the language you transcribed would probably have a lot of difficulty making sense of your transcription read aloud by you, let alone anyone else. Important sounds that make a big difference in meaning would be leveled or omitted. Your prosody in reading your transcript aloud would be odd enough to make even familiar words sound unfamiliar to a native speaker.
Testing this transcription-of-an-unfamiliar-unwritten-language theory would require having a firm grasp of where it was composed, and what cultural tradition its imagery fits into. If the candidate languages for the original text (or speech) could be narrowed down, there might be some hope of figuring out what was intended to be written. Otherwise, the logical endpoint of this theory, unfortunately, is probably a one-way cipher.