So Lisa Fagin Davis's article will be available to read as of tomorrow (I'm looking forward to seeing it), so I thought I would start a thread for specifically discussing ideas about different scribes that she proposes because it may be relevant to shifts in the token-composition as well (if so, it will be very interesting to see).

And since we won't know how the VMS is divided up into scribes until tomorrow, I thought I'd toss in something to hold us over until May 7th...


I haven't studied the scribes other than noticing changes of handwriting in a few places when I was working on my transcripts and I was too busy concentrating on the transcript to record anything about scribes. But there are some things that simply stand out...

... like this example. In my mind, I call this "the careful scribe". It's the same person who wrote the tidy roundish glyphs in the center of 57v. Whoever this is, the person wrote the first phrase at the top-left of this folio and the script directly below it is by another scribe. I don't think this is just a matter of a different quill. The actual shapes are different.

So here is a sample from f75r , something to look at until we get a chance to read Lisa's article:

   

   
To this picture a connection to medicine immediately comes to my mind.

One more case of re-pagination, along with what's been discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The faded-out portion looks like the same "67", or maybe "62". But the writing of "6" is in different hand.

   

Lisa Fagin Davis wrote:

Quote:In other news, my paleography article in Manuscript Studies was published a few days ago. It will be available open-access on May 7, I believe

I often quickly forget what was discussed in the forum, and, the more surprising, I'm also in habit of forgetting the discussions in which I myself took most active part. So please excuse me if what I write below was discussed earlier, we'll merge the threads then.

I collated two trails of thought from the gallows intrusion thread - first one, that daiin may be used as a meaningless (?) filler (though any other vord may be as well, of course). The second one, that the beginnings and endings of lines may be particular candidate positions to place fillers in.

So I took ten most frequent vords (daiin, as we know, is the first one on that list), and calculated the percentage of occurrences which correspond to the vord 's in question being the first or the last vord of a line.

The results are below (the counts are based on the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The first number is the total count,  the second number is the count as line-initial, the third number is the count as line-final, and the final number is the percentage of "(line-initial plus line-final)/total".

daiin    864   156   134      33,4%
ol        538     31     47      14,5%
chedy  501       6     38        8,8%
aiin     470       0     34        7,2%
shedy  427       6     20        6,1%
chol     397     19      6        6,3%
or        366     31     20       13,9%
ar        352       5     27        9,1%
chey    344       5     19        7,0%
dar      319      36    47        26,0%


It's seen that daiin exhibits particular (and almost equal) affinity to line beginnings and endings, with one third of its total occurrences being in those positions, while for most other vords of the top ten, excluding only dar, the count does not exceed 15%, and mostly is under 10%.

What about "variations" of daiin, such as dain and daiiin?

dain    211   47   30      36,5%
daiiin    17     2    4       35,3%

That's funny.

I suspect that daiin is a filler indeed, with dain and daiiin being its variations that occupy slightly less and slightly more space, respectively.

Has it been mentioned before that the bottom left rosette looks like a scaled down diagram of the central one? I just noticed this, but many people have spent much more time on this folio than I have so far so I'm probably re-inventing the wheel.

Anyway, this is what I mean:

   

Similarities are:
* Six in the centre (green)
* Oval shape with asterisk stars, also centre (blue)
* Outward scallops like mountains, topped by rays (orange). There are more tiers in the central one.
* Four "pyramids" (pink), each touching tips with another cone shape (red).

I'm quite excited at the examples provided by Rene in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Quote:In my transliteration I have three annotations related to gallows intruding in the line above. There may be more of course. They are here:

f78v, sixth line of the second paragraph: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

f95v2 line 4: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (the Beinecke scan is better here)

f95v1, paragraph 2 line 2: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There is another marginal case in the middle of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where 'something happened': You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Back in 1839 or 1840 Jacob Grimm was visited by a man who brought him a transcription of a document from 1120. The Document contained a few unclear words, in particular "Twaetihaoyc". Grimm couldn't decipher it and set it aside. A few years later he came across a print of a better transcription of the original document and found the word was actually the name ΓΩΔΕΦΡΗΔΟΥϹ, Godefredus, and somebody originally transcribed it, who didn't know Greek and thus matched it to the most similar looking Latin letter.

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April 23, 2020 article in Print Mag:

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Analysis of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. posted by Edith Sherwood in c. early 2019

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