Direction of labels on rosettes foldout

[-JKP-]

Notice how the big letters make a perfect title for the page?

I keep saying I see words all over the place in the VMS, but I can't make any coherent sense of the manuscript when the same rules are applied to the text as a whole. It's true and it's been driving me nuts for years.


For example, the label (the one above the pink arrow) at a glance looks like "opera rotarum" in conventional abbreviated Latin:

• Push EVA-p down so it has a descender instead of ascender and you get the very common Latin abbreviation for "per".
  
• EVA-m at the end can mean several things in Latin... but it typically it stands for "-ris" or "-rem" but... some lazy scribes also used it for "-rum" because they couldn't be bothered to add the extra bar that usually differentiates -rum from -rem.
  

So, in Latin, it could be expanded as rotar[is] or rotar[um] (depending on the scribe), and becomes an appropriate label for the contents of this folio:


"works of the wheels"


I sometimes wonder if the VMS is 30% real words and the rest is a forest of artificial text hiding the "trees".