VMs: Labels, was: [ha] [hb] not different languages

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

responding to Nick and Jacques in one go:

>> labels should surely provide some kind of
>> way to get under the VMS' skin (like the
>> "Pleiades" label) 

> We've been through all this. The labels could be
> specialized words, precisely like the 12 Chinese 
> characters used to refer to the twelve
> signs of the zodiac, but which have nothing in
> common with the characters expressing the 12 
> associated animals.

IMHO, what's important is that label words
really stand isolated, so they must convey some
unit of information. The same label words appear
in the text surrounded by spaces. The label words
also follow the same general orthographic rules
of Voynichese, *including* the peculiarities that
they can include so-called split gallows, and the
characters Eva-p and Eva-f, which otherwise only
occur in the top lines of paragraphs.

> My point is simply that none of the theories
> devised for labels seems to correlate with any
> other theories.

I don't quite follow. I agree that none of the
proposed solutions of the VMs has any explanation
for the labels, with the exception of Brumbaugh,
who does the opposite and only 'explains' some of
the labels, and not very convincingly IMO.
Any reasonable theory should be able to give
a reasonable explanation for the labels. There
are, after all, a lot of them, and they appear
in essentially all sections of the VMs.

>> They could be "alpha, beta, gamma, delta,
>> eta..." spelt out in full, just like
>> the stars of a constellation are so distinguished.
> 
> Incidentally, does anyone know when the stars of a
> constellation were first listed in this way?

Yes, that was Bayer in 1605. Too late for the VMs.
The classical tradition was just naming the star
or describing how it belonged to the constellation.
The equally classical way to provide its position
was in ecliptical coordinates: longitude is the
n-th degree of the sign of Leo and latitude is
X degrees and Y minutes (of arc - usually in units
of 10 or 15 minutes).

Cheers, Rene


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