Quote:5 - The scribe writes like this because he is trying to write the language of his colleagues, which he is still learning. An Italian in a German speaking group for example. I don't think anything specifically points in this direction though and I don't necessarily think it is the case, but it sounds to me like a reasonably possible scenario.
That's a fair point, and it's entirely plausible. Could he really mess it up so bad as to make it this much unintelligible though? Both amateur and professional paleographers can in most cases work their way through MSs and read them, despite the fact that neither script, dialect or orthography were standardized as nowadays. To me, the fact that we have somewhat sensible readings like "pox leber", "muss mel", "so nim gasmich" in other folia further reinforces the weirdness of not having such a thing for f17r, where we see what appears to be a whole sentence or cohesive groups of words.
Just to be clear, I do find the pen test and charm hypothesis to be the simplest explanations for this marginalia - but personally I believe the next best thing would be obfuscated text. I can't help but find the correction of "mel" to "del" suspicious - especially since "mel" would make some sense.
Quote:Here's an extreme case, from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.inb4 The VMS was just one big pen test book
Quote:Recipe-like words in the marginalia would just be a method of obfuscation or a consequence of the active vocabulary of the author/scribe. For example, the author(s) got the encoding table, and wrote a short sequence where every third (or fifth or whichever) letter is part of the table and the rest are just random letters added to create some resemblance of meaning. If you are dealing with recipes, the random words you conjure up when trying to fill in the pattern created by the cipher table would be "so nim" and "gasmish", etc.
I like approaches like these - having some degrees of freedom when writing the filler text could explain a couple of statistics observed, and it would certainly look like gibberish and not obey many of the patterns of natural languages. I always wonder though, did they really intend to have a few sentences worth of text while writing whole paragraphs of filler text? And could this system be somehow extended or modified to the Labelese we all know and love?
Without digressing from the subforum's maintopic: Is the marginalia largely written using a subset of characters or am I reading in too much? I know the amount of marginalia text is laughably small to make any reliable inferences, but I see a lot of initial m's and p's and final x's and r's. "gas mich" actually stands out as being remarkably different from the rest of the words. Again, it could just be pen tests, spells, or it could simply be me high on goat milk and qokain.