RE: VMs: RE: a and b (and a personal guess)

["Don Latham" <djl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

You don't suppose a was right handed and b was left handed?
Don
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Philip Neal
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 5:57 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: RE: a and b (and a personal guess)


Glen Claston wrote:

>Things we would use to differentiate between one hand writing and another -
>swirls, loops, tails, relative spacing, pen angle, etc., are fairly
>consistent, even on the cramped and unkempt folios.

I think that there is a difference between the writing of the gallows
characters
in hand 1 and hand 2. In hand 2 the right hand loops are much more often
written so small that there is no white parchment visible inside the loop. I
have
just done a rough count of this on a few pages.

Page     Hand     Open loops     Closed loops

25r       1          21                 0
25v      1          22                  0
26r       2          34                 4
26v      2          38                  7
31r       2          47                 4
31v      2         48                  7
32r       1          31                 0
32v      1           14                 0

The explanation may be that the same scribe was writing smaller letters in a
more
cramped space, but the question remains why the text on the hand 1 pages
occupies
more space on the page.

I think Glen's work on the distribution of words between the two hands is
useful
and interesting and confirms the existence of two languages in Currier's
sense, but
I don't see how he gets from there to the idea that different lines on the
same
page can be assigned to one language or the other.

As I think Rene is saying, one of the big differences between language A and
language B is the relative frequency of edy and ody. This might simply be a
difference
of spelling (under certain circumstances A writes e where B writes o): there
is a similar
relation between the frequency of ey and oy in the two languages. Another
difference
is the occurrence of the compound gallows characters such as eke. In
language B they
occur in the same contexts as d towards the end of a word (forms such as
okeekey
seem to alternate with okedy). In language A, they seem to occur in the same
contexts
as d but towards the beginning of a word (forms such as eteol seem to
alternate with
dol). I think that the two "languages" are not two languages such as German
and Latin
enciphered by the same method, but the same language enciphered by two
slightly
different methods.

As for my personal guess, my views have not changed since I last speculated.

When: 1400-1600 (because of the marginalia)
Where: Germany/Austria/Bohemia (because of the marginalia)
Who: probably unknown to history
What: the herbal is a herbal, the astrology section is a calendar, the
recipes are
recipes, the final section is an index and the nymphs I don't know. Probably
several
unrelated books enciphered as a compendium. Enciphered because it contained
Big
Secrets which need not be true or interesting from a modern point of view.

Philip Neal

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