Re: VMs: Trotula di Salerno - tracing her influence on the VMS

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Perhaps we must be more careful when we use the word
> "meaningful".

Absolutely. It is hard to put in words what I had
in mind. The text may have meant something to
the author and nobody else in the world, since it
is in his private language. Or it could be just
one long spell.
Look at:
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~reedsj/soyga.pdf
(found through Google).
See e.g. p.3 for what one may read in the book of 
Soyga.

> I believe that when we decode it we will
> find its contents
> to be a mix of valid information (e.g. firsthand
> plant descriptions in
> the pharma section, or star rising data in the
> zodiac section),
> nonsense copied from other sources, possibly with
> errors and
> misunderstandings (like the T-O map and the overall
> design of the big
> fold-out), and original fantastic speculation or
> charlatanism (like
> the weird details in the big fold-out and in the
> herbal section).

In the above, I guess with 'nonsense' you still
consider nonsense that we can read and understand.
It would be nonsense in the scientific sense of
the word, rather than nonsense in a more linguistic
sense.
In my view, this is the more 'favourable' option,
in the sense that we'll have something to read.
I am not yet sure that, instead, the MS could
contain matarial like: "Cotzi, Cotzizin,
Cotzizizin, Zinzicon," etc..
or 'Six Marix Morix' which would be meaningless
in a different "meaning" of the word :-)

Cheers, Rene



		
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