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One of my problems with
the shorthand outlook is that shorthand in and of itself was considered
relatively secure, so why go the extra step outside of shorthand to build a
script based on shorthand? And yet, just as with language, this cannot be
straight-forward shorthand. Any good theory must be able to explain some
of this to a relative degree of satisfaction.
Let's not forget that
Porta wrote of secrecy by shorthand, as early as 1563 by some accounts, though
not published until 1568. Porta was obviously not English, which means
that the use of shorthand was on the rise in other countries as well. And
I've made a little more progress on the "prayer" on 57v... you have no idea how
seriously disappointed I am that this is working out. On the other hand,
we don't find a dramatic introduction of more "modern" symbology until later in
the book, indicating nothing short of alien thought transferance, I guess....
more probably just a factioid that has no niche to fall in at the
moment.
That the script is based
on shorthand symbols becomes more obvious day by day, but the meaning of this
tidbit is at best elusive. There is simply not enough information in one
place that allows me to attempt a tracing of the history of these symbols.
Some we know are ancient, some are only identified with English systems, and
found nowhere else, but this does not make them English in origin. I am at
once thrilled with my discoveries, and only seconds later extremely disappointed
at the lack of correlation with known facts -- known facts about medieval
shorthand - - there simply aren't any!
GC
Hello Nick,
While I do not dispute the possibility that the
text in the VMS may be a form of shorthand, it does not seem to me that the
text was written in shorthand to keep pace with verbal dissertation. The text
of the VMS appears to be too well organized, written with few errors. This
then begs the question why the "shorthand" format would have been preserved in
the text. In other words, why not translate it out so that we all can
understand and benefit by the contents of the text? Perhaps there is a form of
shorthand that is more useful if kept in its original format; more concise and
easy to read by those in the know, such as scientific notation.
Regards,
Dana Scott
P.S. I was wondering today if there might be any benefit in determining
which came first on the folios, drawings or text. Interestingly, there appears
to be a good combination of different approaches (sometimes drawings first, at
other times text first, and then there may even be a mixture of text and
drawings where there is some drawing followed by text and then additional
drawings and more text). I am not sure that there is anything significant here
aside from mild curiosity.
----- Original Message -----
From:
Nick Pelling
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 6:19
AM
To: voynich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: VMs: Re: More shorthand
trivia
Hi everyone,
Yet more shorthand-related
stuff.
While in Leeds for a few days, I got a reader's pass for the
University
Library, which houses the Brotherton Shorthand Collection.
Talking with
Oliver Pickering, the only LIbrarian there who seemed to
know anything
about it, it became clear that shorthand is incredibly
unfashionable as a
research subject.
I read a number of books on
shorthand: one of the problems with the subject
is that most authors on
the history of shorthand tend to be proponents of a
particular new
system, and thus read the events in a way designed to
support their own
views. Perhaps this is true of history in general.
Isaac Pitman's "A
history of shorthand" (I read the 1891 edition, though
there are others)
mentions a shorthand system designed by a Mr Radcliff (or
Ratcliffe) of
Plymouth, apparently first published in 1688, but believed to
have been
designed at least a century earlier.
Radcliff's system was based on
aggressive textual reduction, discarding
vowels and stopping words short
once it was apparent what they were: the
Lord's Prayer, for example,
became:
Our Fth wch rt n hvn ; hlwd b y Nm
Y Kgdm cm Y wl b dn n
rth z it s n Hvn
As far as Bright goes: in 1572, he spent some time
in Paris, and found his
way to the embassy while the massacre of the
Huguenots was happening - he
too was a Protestant, staying with
Huguenots, and was lucky to escape being
caught in the middle of that
particular storm.
As I mentioned in a previous email, Paris had had a
guild of tabletiers
(wax tablet makers) for many centuries, so my
current best guess is that
Bright saw, on his trip there, abbreviated
letters being used to take down
sermons on a wax tablet.
To stand
any chance of keeping up with the flow of natural speech, just
about any
abbreviated alphabet (rather than an extended alphabet) would
need to
have the property of being, like the VMS, based on single
strokes.
So: I believe that Bright's particular innovation was the
arbitraries,
rather than single-stroke alphabets per se - I believe that
these would
have been in existence long before him.
Curiously,
the gallows characters - if viewed as a framework for writing
X's
quickly - fit this kind of shorthand paradigm very well. This points to
a shorthand whose primary mode for representing numbers was Roman
numerals
- "37" is always going to be quicker to write than "XXXVII",
however you
encode it. Perhaps this alone points to a pre-1500 date for
the VMS' core
alphabet?
I'm confident that this is the real deal:
that the VMS' alphabet is a
mature, well-known shorthand script, that
had been used (possibly for
centuries) for transcribing the spoken word
(probably in a religious
context, but other writing contexts are
entirely possible) onto wax tablets.
Also, remember that, circa 1450,
code-book extensions to ciphers were well
known and widely used: for
example, many of them are boxed modern numbers
(ie, [1] = The Pope, [2]
= The King Of France, etc). These form a simple
kind of data compression
- which would be just as important for a shorthand
scribe as for a
code-maker. But where did the idea of number codes *come
from*?
Here's my current belief: that the alphabet we see in the VMS
is a
shorthand alphabet, designed for writing on a wax tablet, but
containing a
specific number code to help keep the shorthand scribe's
writing up to
speed. This general idea arose on the continent round
about 1400 - and
forms the raw concept from which the idea of code-book
ciphers arose.
GC's absolutely right: stenography and steganography
were twins, grown from
the same seed - but with the VMS, we may be
looking at that very seed!
Cheers, .....Nick
Pelling.....
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