Re: VMs: Re: Moot points, getting long

[Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Elmar,

At 16:44 04/08/2004 +0200, Elmar Vogt wrogt:
> It is my conviction that the concept of the VM will be discernible by a 
> look at
> the more obvious, well-known features, and will not depend on the exact
> varieties of plumes.

Not a bad working hypothesis, but be aware that a large number of 
Quattrocento ciphers have pairs of deliberately similar-looking letters in 
their cipherbets. It therefore seems prudent to watch out for (say) two 
types of EVA "y", etc.

However, I should add that I don't know what analysis GC has done on the 
various "y" and plume variants to see how their contexts (both before and 
after) differ etc, as this would be the proper first step towards seeing if 
differentiating between two shapes is meaningful or not. Simply agreeing 
that such shape differences don't exist (as EVA does) is plainly less sensible.

> Yet this misses the point of my previous mail, namely that the exact
> transcription system will not be crucial for the decryption of the VM, at 
> least
> in stage one as described above.

I fully applaud GC's efforts to transcribe more of what is there to be seen 
than does EVA. My caveat there is this would need to be built on a full 
understanding of what strokes were made, when and why - the current thread 
on how to write a <ch> is perhaps a case in point. As we are "working under 
uncertainty", should our transcription make a note of which direction each 
stroke took? Surely that is where a proper "stroke transcription" should 
aspire towards?

Where such a detailed transcription - even of single pages - might 
particularly help is in understanding the differences between the Hand 1 
and Hand 2 pages, or even the various shades of Currier "languageness".

However, having recently gone back to the sidfiles just to try to 
understand better how <Ch> and <Sh> were physically written, I have to say 
that stripping it right back to the strokes is hard work, right at the 
limit of the sidfiles - and right at the limit of the original scribe's 
ability to concentrate.

For example, on some pages I've looked at, <Ch>s often appear to have been 
written as two strokes: (1) a slightly wide-topped "c" (top to bottom), 
followed by (2) the horizontal bar (left to right, overlapping the top part 
of the first "c" shape), terminating in the second "c" shape (top to 
bottom) - witness the "t"-like left "c"-shapes in the first two <Ch>s on 
line 5 of f11r, where the two component strokes don't quite join up 
cleanly. Yet, on other pages I've looked at, this never happens at all. 
Scribal tiredness, or cipher subtlety?

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


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