Aott-naL
Jon Bold > 02-11-2024, 05:24 PM
I have been looking at the VM for a few years and I think I have some incremental ideas about the text and some ideas about what the VM is. I am not going to “read it to you”, I would rather show you how to read it. I hope you can recognize and handle the genuine article.
Now, I am going to swim upstream against a lot of popular answers out there and say some things nobody else has said. Starting with: The images of plants, etc. were on the pages before the texts were written. Most of the text has nothing to do with the images.
I think what’s written here is music, a melody line, perhaps in a pentatonic scale, but the lyrics are missing. Could it be liturgical music? Not gregorian chant but perhaps plainsong. If so, we know the words. One of the reasons it is hard for us to believe this is music is how weird and convoluted the Italian system of music is that we use today.
Here is some information the cryptologists should be interested in. There is one short straight line segment in the midst of each of the characters. Most of the characters of the text are distracting serifs, entry swirls, exit swirls etc. the informative part of the character is often nothing more than a horizontal line segment, a vertical line segment, a diagonal line segment, three or four parallel line segments, a cruciform, or a saltier.
Which leaves only about five to nine basic characters, not enough for an alphabet. This is not language. It is a (non-Tironian) shorthand or a code. There are enough characters for a musical scale of one “octave”.
There are other reasons why I think this is a private system for documenting a melody. Notice how often consecutive lines differ by one or very few characters. Typical of hymns. I suspect His Majesty, with a good sense of pitch, was writing the melody down while listening to it.
There are some specific characters with tentative meaning: Starting many lines, there is a common character made of four line segments connected with loopy corners, that means “Four Beats”. Trace this character in the air, starting with a rising line and you will feel like you are a conductor. It is often followed by four characters which I think are notations about those four beats.
Similarly, the character made of three line segments with two loopy top corners means “Three Beats” and is often followed by three characters.
“Two Beats” looks like “three beats” but the upper left loop is missing. It would be followed by two characters.
There are many examples where a beat character is written over the first character in a line. Perhaps the scribe wrote the line and came back to fill in the beat character after counting the beats.
A space between characters might be a repeat or sustain of the preceding character. Or, it might be a natural break between lines of text. But, they seem useful in locating the beginning of a string of characters, where we will find one of the “beat” characters, which tell us how many characters follow.
This makes the character that looks like an (8) and the character that looks like an (o) special characters.
If I am at all correct about any of this, then we should be able to count up the beats in a line of text to know the meter of it, and possibly relate our findings to known examples of very old music, like Veni Veni Emmanuel, or Personent Hodie.
I will venture a guess. The horizontal line is the tonic and the same line with a vertical line above it is the octave. I have no proof. I may substitute values into the other symbols to see if this turns into recognizable music.
On another subject, The ladies. There are multiple sketches of Her majesty receiving a barrel of cool water and a bottle of wine. Fifteenth century gynecology? On the top of page 140 ( left 78) Her Majesty is, isn’t it obvious, cleaning out her fallopian tubes. There is only one lady in all those sketches.