RE: 116v
Anton > 03-05-2021, 12:17 PM
Another instance where the seemingly "ungrammatical" word order would be acceptable is the poetic verse, from which this kind of phrase may have been (theoretically) borrowed.
The example from the real poem which I quoted above seems to demonstrate that: as far as I understand, "er muste gahs von im vare" is like English "he had to quickly from him move". Another interesting point in this example is that words "balde" and "gahs", seemingly of the same meaning, are used together.
What is certain is that there is, at the moment, no satisfactory reading neither of the first, nor of the last line on the whole. In the first line, "pox leber" is pretty undisputable, after that we have some mess, and the last word may be the most enigmatic in all the VMS marginalia. In the last line, "so nim" is clear, all other parts are questionable and require some additional "explanations" to be brought in.
Summarizing the cons of three major interpretations discussed in this thread:
- so nim gas mich - irregular word order, implied personification ("mich") related to some object outside the phrase itself, no space between "gas" and "mich"
- palden probiren so nim gasmi[l]ch - assumption that l was omitted and not corrected back, assumption that pbren is abbreviated probiren (no historic examples to confirm), also I'm unsure about the grammar of "palden probiren"
- nimtzas - the stuff looks much more like "g", not "cz" or "tz", also quite a decent space between "nim" and the supposed "tz"
Interestingly, as I noted some years ago, if we take it for ubren instead of pbren, then ub is Swiss for uber (see Idiotikon), and ren is abomasum, which is depicted to the upper left, annotated as "lab" (meaning the same thing). This fits the context, but again there is no space between ub and ren, and the more so, there seems to be the trace of the descender...
Maybe one could approach it in a systematical way, trying to localize the exact dialect that this is written in, using some hints. One hint that is 100% there is that "p" is systematically used versus "b", it is pox, not bocks, and it is palden and not balden. I do not know if this can suggest any specific location though, and was not just common.