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Re: VMs: Faces at the roots
Hi Wayne,
At 13:49 25/04/2005 -0400, Wayne Durden wrote:
Hi Nick! I admit that I will attack a problem like this both top down or
bottom up but I would take issue with the suggestion that I presume the
labels function in the way I'd expect then look for evidence to support
the idea. I arrived at this suggestion that they are nulls after my
initial query "that the labels could have meaning that might be teased out
in reference to the drawings" didn't appear to be the case when looking at
digraphs across subject matter folios and the position of the digraphs in
the main text bodies.
In the absence of any confirmed decipherment or reading, I see no reason to
believe that the labels do or don't contain meaning, whether teased out in
reference to the drawings or not. Your presumption that they don't seems to
be based (in turn) on the further presumption that they ought to be in a
simple substitution cipher, whereas nothing in the rest of the VMs (nor in
the 90 years of apparently failed decipherments) would seem to support this
idea. Am I missing your point?
I think this may be the opposite of what you are suggesting, i.e., I
didn't initially presume the label digraphs were nulls and then go
looking for support. ... In any case, where one is attacking a problem
of this nature, I wouldn't even agree that it would be inappropriate to
have a hypothesis and then see if the existing data already developed
support that hypothesis as opposed to looking at all of the data that has
been developed and seeing if any hypothesis might fit (drawing a least
squared line after collecting). Nonetheless, that wasn't what happened
in this particular case. I think I have generally described the thought
processes after considering label digraphs as parts of speech (nouns,
adjectives, etc.) elsewhere today.
Again, unless you know better there's as yet no reason to think that labels
are nouns or adjectives - or even words per se. Given the long
"recipe-like" section at the back, many labels might just as well refer
(admittedly in some convoluted way, like an odd numbering system) to a
paragraph there.
As an aside to a separate post, these days I tend to tune out when people
invoke Occam's Razor in their reasoning: parsimony may be virtuous, but
evidence gets convictions.
As to your Nullo body modification discussion below. What was in fact
meant was "Nulloes" as written which is a historical use for nulls. If
you put "nulloes" in google you will see such examples as in "Cyphars
intermixt with Nulloes" You will note there is some significance to gates
or double characters amongst sources that pop up as well....
While your body modification reference is interesting, Nulloes is indeed
exactly what was intended.
Bacon uses "nulloes" once, though elsewher in Book VI of The Advancement Of
Learning" he also uses NVLLES: and I am reasonably sure that null/nulle was
the generally recognised spelling even circa 1600. He also seems to flip
between cypher/cyphar: perhaps all of these subtle variations form part of
a subtle bi-literary mis-spelling cipher on his part? Perhaps a spelling
mistake in the first half of a word denotes a "0" and a spelling mistake in
the latter half of a word denotes a "1"? You never know what might be
hidden there... :-)
While it's true that Bacon did coin many words still in use today (like
"euthanasia"), IIRC he also coined a load of stinkers (not too far from the
Blackadder episode with Samuel Johnson [*]). But regardless of which
category "nulloes" should go in, as Google returns 9 hits for it (whereas
"nulls" gets 372,000), I'll stick with "nulls", if that's OK?
Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
[*] "Sausages" aside, of course. [This footnote only for Blackadder trivia
fans]
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