Re: Off-topic Latin request.

[Jordan Lund <lundj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    As long as this thread is already off topic, I just found out about a
new program called Gooey (http://www.gooey.com) and it allows all the people
currently accessing any given web page to chat with each other while viewing
the site. Think of it as a browser and page specific ICQ. Currently only for
Windows, this could be a really valuable research tool...

> 
> Jim Reeds wrote:
>> 
>> Good work spotting it in Beard, Jim. Bad work on the Latin grammar
>> front, Henry: catapulta, -ae, is a first declension noun, and
>> hence "catapultum" and "catapultus" (one each in Beard's
>> sententiae) are impossible forms. In fact, even without a
>> dictionary you can tell something is wrong in the 2nd sentence: no
>> Latin noun can have both -ae and -us forms: only 1st declension
>> nouns have -ae forms, and only 2nd and 4th declension nouns have
>> -us forms. (If only I had remembered this in time for my  final
>> exam in Mrs Craik's Latin class in 1962!)
> 
> And, for something of Voynichology interest, there's always:
> 
> "Michiton oladabas multos portas... "
> 
> Note the lack of gender agreement in "multas portas". And, "michi" for
> "mihi", and the superfluous "ola-" in front of "dabas".
> 
> Newbold was much too smart to make mistakes like these.  He must have
> felt that the VMs's putative encryyption scheme would leave this error,
> since his decipherment scheme had so many variables.  It's the story we
> know all too well - a system with so many variables that someone using
> it can read plain text into just about anything.
> 
> Dennis Stallings
>