RE: f17r
Diane > 04-10-2018, 05:30 AM
I hope all will forgive if this has been treated before. I've read 6 of the 13 pages of these posts and found no mention of Pelling in them, though so far as I know his was the first effort to analyse this piece of marginalia, to render some of the words in the way they are still rendered and so on.
My question has nothing to do with whether or not his rendering is correct. It is simply this:
If, for argument's sake, his rendering WERE accepted, then would his 'light/sunlight' be correctly the sentence's subject, or its object?
Since not everyone may have a copy of Pelling's book, Curse of the Voynich (2006). I'll quote the bit from page 25 in full.
Pelling wrote (p.25)
Looking more closely at the first word, there's a fine horizontal bar through the (later alteration) 'a', indicating that its second letter could well have originally been 'e' - making the whole word probably "meilhor" (presumably in a Romance language, derived from the Latin melior as in 'ameliorate'). But this would make its third letter a looped Germanic "l": which in turn would make the second word look like the French verb 'aller' to go. So it probably originally read "meilhor aller".. - like the start of a real sentence in some kind of hybrid Romance language.
[Notes - by me]. Nick is mistaken in seeing the script's 'l' as peculiarly Germanic. It's just a form of Gothic script and occurs in France and in England and elsewhere. Also, his use of 'hybrid' implies belief that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was an accepted set of discrete Romance languages, whereas that impression is only true for the literate classes (to some extent) and very largely today a result of post-eighteenth century efforts to create an official standard in every one of the officially used vernaculars. Medieval dialects were spoken languages, few used by the literate classes and they actually formed a continuum across the geographic areas - which is why there is debate over whether the Voynich month-names are Judeo-Catalan, or Occitan etc. and why e.g. even today, English dialects include ones where e.g. 'done' is always used where standard English demands 'did'. For all we know, the Voynich marginalia represent notes added to the manuscript from information given by non-literate persons whose dialect isn't straight 'Occitan' or 'Catalan' or 'French' according to modern classificiation..... For all we know.
But back to Nick, who continued:
It should be no surprise that 'meilhor' also means 'better' in Occitan, while 'aller' in Occitan means much the same as in modern French; and the same third word appears to be the Occitan lutz, meaning 'light' or 'sunlight', but where the 't' and the 'z' have been (faultily) joined together
[Note...Nick adds 'by a later owner' which I think unproven]....
In the Beinecke library scans, the fourth word (which starts with a curious letter) looks like kou, while the subsequent words fade right away (despite the apparent emendation). It seems that the whole line was therefore originally a complete Occitan sentence starting with "meilhor aller lutz (kou)..." meaning mystifyingly something like "to run light better"...
Nick's erroneous belief that looped l and h (that's small L and small H) in this marginalia show some character peculiarly German affects the rest of his writing on p.25, as done a curious idea that a manuscript had to travel to foreign parts to acquire marginalia in a foreign hand. We have English manuscripts even in England where marginalia show the hands and sometimes the languages) of at least four or five different countries, but the assumption is usually that the writers came to libraries.
But that's not an issue of interest at present. The one that is, is the question I posed before, namely:
IF, for argument's sake, we take Pelling's Occitan rendering as granted, then would 'lutz' be the grammatical subject or the object of that sentence?