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If you read some of Dee's manuscripts in Latin he uses abbreviations
extensively. In fact, many documents that I have seen that is wordy
and not meant to be a "work of art" - such as bibles - use abbreviated
words.
As much as I hate the iconic world of modern kids emails ("B4 U go to the
mall..") I have to admit that this is an ancient practice. Of course
modern people don't have to write by hand on expensive paper with expensive ink
and use a quill...
****************************** Larry Roux Syracuse University lroux@xxxxxxx ******************************* >>> mdp114@xxxxxxxxxx 07/10/03 01:30PM >>> I'm afraid I am relatively new to this game, so please have mercy if what I
say seems ridiculous, or has been said too many times before.
Does the idea of Latin abbreviations not raise questions about who the
Voynich manuscript was intended for? If it's a write-only document with
incomprehensible abbreviations, only understood by the author(s), then the
neatness, the lack of crossings-out, the exotic drawings of nymphs and the like
do not make much sense. Why would the author go to the trouble of ensuring that
the VMS was a more-or-less pristine copy with precise diagrams if it was only a
set of notes for his own benefit?
If, on the other hand, the VMS is intended for someone else, maybe for
posterity, it might be ciphered so that only men of learning could understand
it. This would require the cipher to be logical, and context-dependancy wouldn't
help matters.
Is it possible that the characters in the VMS represent syllables, perhaps,
or whole words? This might be a method of encoding to save space. Vellum, after
all, is, and always was, expensive. Alternatively the symbols in the VMS might
not be plaintext at all. They could indicate symbols used in, for instance,
predicate logic, or mathematics, or alchemical formulae. If I were to write
OOsOsl&Of, for instance, I have no doubt you would all be puzzled; but I
might say that there was no problem at all: it's a quadratic equation, s^2 + s =
-f.
Alternatively, perhaps f116's
"michiton oladabas multos te tær cerc portas" indicates
the decryption method. To me it looks (but remember, I am a new amateur) like a
scribbled note, maybe translating a portion of text back into Latin, "michi
dabas multas portas", dropping some null characters, "ton ola te tær cerc". This
might indicate that the decryption algorithm leaves some null characters in the
translation.
Just some thoughts.
Matthew David Platts
"I agree to a certain extent. Latin abbreviations are pretty
extensive (ie what looks like a "9" can mean '-us', '-s', etc). 17th
Century French has similar abbreviations (P^e for Premiere or
Pierre). Context has always, and will always mean a lot in any form of
shorthand system.
You could translate the shorthand sentence to "and then three were awards"
instead of "and then there were words" but if the previous sentence was "In the
beginning there were Letters" then your translation makes little
sense."
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