Huth's reading of f116v: "gâs" as "ganz" confirmed in medieval German corpus

[Torsten]

Hm, I haven't watched the presentation but this solves the problem of the creative goat milk spelling. However the language of your examples is truly ancient. Middle High German. That's 12th, 13th century, not 15th. And in one of the examples, gas is gahes / gach (fast, swiftly), not ganz. Both are viable readings for gas, I think we already had this discussion. Considering the overall weirdness of marginalia texts it's another one of countless interpretations.

Thank you for the critical engagement. Two points:

Regarding the dating: The three instances come from "Athis und Prophilias," a verse romance preserved in a manuscript from the third quarter of the 13th century in Hessian-Thuringian dialect (Berlin, Staatsbibl., Nachlass Grimm 196; Krakow, Bibl. Jagiellońska, Berol. mgq 846; edition: Kraus 1926; Handschriftencensus: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). You are right that this is earlier than the Voynich Manuscript. However, the Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch covers texts only up to 1350, so the absence of 15th-century attestation reflects the scope of the corpus, not necessarily the disappearance of the form.

Regarding the alternative reading gâhes/gâch (swiftly): This is a fair point for the first example — "den vrouwin Und îlte des gâs zouwin" — where "îlte" (hurried) pairs naturally with an adverb of speed. For the other two examples, "ganz" seems the more natural reading: "bat im gâs ir uindin" (asked him to find them entirely) and "Sie azin gâs un̄ quamin" (they ate completely, i.e. finished eating, and left). But I agree that gâhes cannot be excluded on purely contextual grounds in a 13th-century text.

The disambiguation comes from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. itself. "So nim gâs mich" makes natural sense as "so take me wholly" but not as "so take me swiftly." Either way, the corpus confirms that the form "gâs" — spelled with long-s and circumflex on the a — is attested in East Central German. This addresses the main problem with the standard reading "gasmich" as a single compound word for "Gaismilch" (goat's milk), which requires an unattested scribal omission of the L in "milch."