(03-05-2023, 10:29 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."An You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [...] is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel..."
Hi, Koen:
I have been able to do this with decoded plant names having unusual spellings in ciphered recipes. In one particular case I was able to pinpoint the use of a Swiss-German dialect, around Zurich (best documented in a small town Northwest of Zurich), which fit with the rough known history of the manuscript's ownership in the Switzerland area. As you know, recipes are often added by later owners and the use of ciphers for sensitive aspects is relatively common.
The biggest issue I had was the lack of scholarly record of actual plant names used in the timeframe of the recipe writing. However, using the unusual spelling I was able to use Google to turn up rare examples and which led me to an academic that had actually researched particular general spelling variations in dialects. In particular, the use of "syni" as a female ending that I had found in the spelling of a plant as "antiffiasyni."
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Login to view. is a link to a short paper by Nancy Thuleen documenting this in relation to prior work on this in the 1960s.
Ultimately, other research (specifically using the Zedler Lexicon, a German encyclopedia during the 1700s) revealed that antiffien was a word for endive so "antiffiasyni" is medieval free-spelled Swiss-German dialect version of endive.
[I had a screenshot of the Zedler Lexicon page showing this but it goes into the forum posting gigantic, so I pulled it]
Yes, I did learn this backwards, with the ending coming to light prior to the "base" word but ultimately it all came together.
However, I caution that the unusual spelling was the reason why this was even possible and it took a lot of digging. The words you are proposing unfortunately are not so unique.
For example, "mich" as a variant spelling for "milch" will include an enormous amount of false positives because "mich" means "me." It may be impossible because of the need to see context in order to catch those rare unusual uses. On the other hand, it is possible that someone has documented spelling variations for "milch" since it is a common word that maybe someone documenting a dialect would capture (particularly if it was unusual).
I don't want to stop you and if I think of a strategy that could help, I will certainly be back.
Michelle