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Re: VMs: Antidotary labels...

Hi Rene,

At 01:17 02/06/2003 -0700, Rene wrote: 
Nick wrote:
>  ... in my experience, most apothecary measures
> in ms recipes of 1450 and before were normally
> in 1s, 2s, 4s, but (especially) 3s (because of
> its magical connotations) - echoes of which
> unsophisticated measures I see reflected in the
> VMS' dain daiin daiiin.

Let's just throw this idea around a bit.
Remember that 'dan' also occurs, but, together
with daiiin it is much less frequent than dain and
daiin. So, which sequence would make more
sense:
0, 1, 2, 3
1, 2, 3, 4
10, 11, 12, 13
11, 12, 13, 14
(more are possible of course).
I kind of like the second, because, perhaps, 'one'
is a word which could be left out as it is implicit,
and 4 would be written more frequently in an
alternative manner (like Roman iiii and iv).
What would the alternative look like in the VMs?

If the rest of the VMS is in code, there's no reason to suppose that the number corresponds literally to the number of i's. Though it probably is. :-)

To be honest, I'm not convinced that any of this
is right, since there are also 'ain' and 'aiin',
without the 'd' and how to explain them?

If (like me) you see the "d" as being probably linked with a shorthand "cursive z" (and hence also with "cursive z bar", the apothecary ounce symbol), then <dain> looks like a way of hiding "oncia i", etc. "d" on its own could mean either "z" or "oncium", "ain" on its own could mean "i", etc.

In fact, I see this as being possibly associated with one of the design aims (or perhaps what one might call a "scribal deliverable") of the VMS' code - to exactly (and reversibly) encode the contents of a group of manuscripts. That is, whereas some documents' security could be increased by using obscure synonyms and misspellings, I believe that the VMS is encoded "as is", and hence required a more secure form of encoding than was normally used.

We shall see... :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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