A general comment on aut/autem...
In Gothic text "aut" and "autem" are frequently written the same as each other, sometimes "a" followed by three minims, sometimes two, sometimes one and sometimes just one minim with a tail or even just the "a" with a tail, all of which are hauntingly like the VMS in the sense that the number of minims that follow "a" in "dain" varies in much the same way as various scribes' way of writing aut/autem.
What is weird about the VMS (besides the way dain is placed at the ends of tokens) is that the VMS has all these variations in one manuscript. It was NOT common for each scribe to write "aut" or "autem" in more than a couple of ways. Even though there is leeway in how one could write them, each scribe usually chose one or two variations of aut and one or two variations of autem and stayed fairly consistently with those.
In contrast, in the VMS, there is regular variation between seven different versions of what we call "dain":... av, aiv, aiw, auiv, auv, aiiw, aiuw PLUS the ones where the "V" shape at the end looks a little more like a Gothic "d" than a v-shape, which adds about three more.
.
Thus "dain" is far more varied than aut/autem/ad in a way that begs one to interpret them differently AND which almost resembles numbers (Roman numerals) rather than letters. It makes it difficult to draw parallels between the VMS tokens and Gothic text, especially considering what precedes and follows "dain" in the VMS is often the same small selection of glyphs (one would expect more variation in characters surrounding them if they were abbreviations).
In Gothic text "aut" and "autem" are frequently written the same as each other, sometimes "a" followed by three minims, sometimes two, sometimes one and sometimes just one minim with a tail or even just the "a" with a tail, all of which are hauntingly like the VMS in the sense that the number of minims that follow "a" in "dain" varies in much the same way as various scribes' way of writing aut/autem.
What is weird about the VMS (besides the way dain is placed at the ends of tokens) is that the VMS has all these variations in one manuscript. It was NOT common for each scribe to write "aut" or "autem" in more than a couple of ways. Even though there is leeway in how one could write them, each scribe usually chose one or two variations of aut and one or two variations of autem and stayed fairly consistently with those.
In contrast, in the VMS, there is regular variation between seven different versions of what we call "dain":... av, aiv, aiw, auiv, auv, aiiw, aiuw PLUS the ones where the "V" shape at the end looks a little more like a Gothic "d" than a v-shape, which adds about three more.
.
Thus "dain" is far more varied than aut/autem/ad in a way that begs one to interpret them differently AND which almost resembles numbers (Roman numerals) rather than letters. It makes it difficult to draw parallels between the VMS tokens and Gothic text, especially considering what precedes and follows "dain" in the VMS is often the same small selection of glyphs (one would expect more variation in characters surrounding them if they were abbreviations).
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