(05-05-2026, 04:15 AM)Charly Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(what is the current consensus that the creator of the manuscript could have had connections with a trade route going through Constantinople?).
There is still no consensus about the origin and nature of the VMS. There are as many theories as there are researchers. Or even more than that.
Quote:I am attempting to interpret these images and would appreciate opinions on the following EVA defined glyphs, please (#5 is only present to show how faint parts of <qo> can become);
In general, my belief is that the Author wrote an original draft of the text on paper, with a rather cursive handwriting. The Scribe was taught the alphabet, but did not understand the language or the meaning of the text. He had some experience with a quill, and a passable handwriting, as if he had been an accountant or business secretary; but had no experience with drawing, writing on vellum, or writing books. And he was not motivated to produce a nice-looking result (as a professional scribe at a monastery would be). I think it is possible that he was doing the job as a favor for the Author.
So the Scribe often struggled to read the Author's draft, and that led him to substitute some glyphs by others that would look similar in sloppy handwriting. For instance, it seems that he would replace the ending
in by
r, and substitute
d for
k (but not
t) or vice-versa.
Imagine someone trying to copy an text written with Latin letters but in cursive script and a thoroughly unfamiliar language. How often would he mistake an n for a u or a v, an y for ij, etc? On the VMS, these errors may have been as common as 1 in 20, or even more.
The Scribe would have also made many additional errors due to haste or fatigue. Like writing
aiiin or
ain instead of
aiin, omitting an
e, writing
Ch as
ee, etc. His glyphs were often deformed to the point that today we cannot be sure of what he meant to write. That is probably what created that stretched
s on your image 6.
On some of those cases he would notice the mistake and go back, retracing the glyph so as to fix the mistake. That is part of my explanation for figure 4: he first drew the
t with a very small right loop, then he went back and fixed it by drawing a bigger loop; but he had to re-draw the right leg closer to the left one.
Then, maybe a century of two later, there was that general restoration pass that retraced most of the text that had faded. Unlike the Scribe, neither the Restorer who did this job nor the Owner who commissioned it knew the alphabet, except from looking at the text (like we do now). So the Restorer often added more errors by "correcting" or "restoring" glyphs into the wrong ones, or even invalid glyphs.
This is my explanation for your figure 3: the Scribe originally drew the plume of the
Sh out of place, almost on top of the second
e, and then the Restorer "fixed" it by drawing a second plume in the right place. And also the second half of the explanation for figure 4: the Restorer tried to fix the three-legged
t by filling the space between the two right legs,
That may also be the explanation for the
qo with plume on figure 6. The two letters qo are usually a prefix, not an isolated word. I suspect that the original glyph was a
Sh, which had faded do much that the Restorer mistook it for a
qo -- leaving the original plume.
And then there must be errors made by the Author himself on his draft. In my origin theory, the Author had an imperfect knowledge of the language and was taking dictation from someone who may have been only partly literate himself. So he probably made many mistakes. (I lived for 13 years in the US, but I still cannot hear the difference between the vowels of "man" and "men"; to my ears they both sound the same, like the Italian or French "è". I don't think I would be able to distinguish the long and short vowels of German. Likewise there are many consonants of Arabic and other languages that I cannot distinguish. If I were to take dictation in those languages, I would get those letters wrong half the time...)
So I now believe that deciphering the VMS will be a painfully tedious and messy task because of all those errors. It will not be like cracking a cryptographic puzzle, where one just has to discover the algorithm, and then immediately one will get the whole plaintext without errors. It will be more like deciphering a lost language like Sumerian or Etruscan, where the speed of progress is measured in words per year...
All the best, --stolfi