Re: VMs: RE: Nabataean /sefira?

[Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The producer of the VMS was almost certainly a European, for the reasons given by
Glen. The underlying language, if there is one, may or may not be European. There
seems to be a trend for explanations involving "exotic" languages (i.e. ones
little known in Europe at that period) to claim progressively less encoding with
increasing distance from Western Europe. So, explanations involving Chinese or
Vietnamese argue for little or no encoding, just a variant orthography;
explanations involving Eastern Europe argue for minor encoding (e.g. removing
vowels); explanations involving Latin argue for very complex ciphers.

One plausible explanation is that the VMS was produced by a European who had
become familiar with an "exotic" language, and who then encoded an original
plaintext by firstly translating it into the "exotic" language, and then encoding
the translation. That could be done fairly quickly, and would give few points of
access for would-be decoders, unless they knew what the language was. Given the
number of voyages of discovery in the 1490s, it's plausible that a
scholar/adventurer could have learned a language known to only a handful of
people in Europe, which would make such a code pretty secure for a long time.
There are apparently examples of this approach being used for purposes such as
keeping private diaries, though I don't have any solid references for this.

That model could possibly get round the problem of high numbers of repeated words
- for instance, two words differentiated by tone in Vietnamese might both be
transliterated into the same form before encoding. It would still hit problems
with low numbers of "phrases", though, especially if the illustrations really are
related to the text - you'd expect a fairly high degree of schematisation within
each section if the illustrations do correspond with the text.

Best wishes,

Gordon



Vladimir Sazonov wrote:

> GC wrote:
>
> ><<The script
> >may *look* oriental (I never thought so), but a majority of the glyphs were
> >standards in Latin abbreviation  and shorthand, and a few rare glyphs have
> >only one documented origin to date, which happens to be English shorthand.
> >The clothing styles are western, the hair is blond and brunette on average,
> >and what religious imagery that exists is Christian.  The text is
> >overwhelmingly written left to right, and any section, page or paragraph
> >that is more right justified than left has escaped my notice, although I
> >have commented on the amateurish attempt to full justify in several
> >passages, which was common in western illuminated manuscripts of the period.
> >Scribes employed as copyists were trained in the art of metering and
> >measuring to achieve proper full justification of text, but this manuscript
> >does not exhibit that training.  Another nail in the coffin of the "ignorant
> >scribe" theory, and one more point for the "original author" theory.
> >
> >No physical evidence of oriental origin has been presented to date that
> >confutes this short list, so I doubt I'll have to bring out the long,
> >detailed list to make my point.
> >
>
> The jewisch community in Prague  this time was very strong and had very
>  strong cultural tradition- All the time of middleage the jews exchanged
> letters
> through all jewish communities from Cairo, Jerusalem, Germany, Spain,
> Morocco. Therefore it is no wonder, if the manuscript has oriental
> )jewish, arabic ...) origin.
>
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