Re: VMs: Lines as functional units

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the list! :-)

At 18:10 18/07/2003 +0100, Mike Stannett wrote:
> a) lines seem to be functional linguistic units
> b) words tend to be short
> c) this doesn't seem to be due to abbreviation
> d) there are lots of repeated-word segments
>
> It occurs to me that all of these features can be partially explained
> by a single hypothesis: the inclusion of poetry/verse. I'm not
> suggesting that the whole thing is in verse, of course, but that parts
> of it may be.

Certainly, the right-hand indentation on f81r looks (to my eye) like the 
page might well be in verse. But I think you'll find that this page has 
quite a different kind of line-end statistics from the kind Currier 
described (for example, only one line on it has the terminal <-m> 
character), which you'll find to be the case nearly everywhere elsewhere in 
the VMS (IIRC).

This same kind of indentation is superficially evident on the top 40% of 
f112r - but note that here the line-end characters feature numerous <-m> 
characters (and so follow Currier). I would suggest that this page is 
therefore more likely to be associated with the kind of flaw, rip or 
similar defect in the original vellum that Phil Neal has proposed before, 
and not poetry per se.

Interestingly, if you look at f112v (ie the reverse side of f112r), you'll 
see that the first 10 lines are sharply left-indented, while the text's 
line-width generally expands as the text goes down the page. To my eyes, 
this strongly suggests that this is a copy of a document, where the 
copyists have tried to retain the (flaw-constrained) layout of the original 
- there's no obvious reason why the whole width of the vellum wouldn't have 
been used (unlike f81r, the text here doesn't look much like a poem).

IMO, these particular pages are problematic for all theories which try to 
explain the VMS in terms of anything other than cryptography or a 
translation of an existing text into a bizarre language - it seems like a 
strange step of the imagination, even for a hoaxer... for why would a 
hoaxer want to fake a copy of a manuscript, rather than to fake an 
original? There's surely more money to be had in hoaxing an original 
manuscript than in hoaxing a copy of a manuscript?

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


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