(2 hours ago)proto57 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you think one 15th c. scribe knew these forms and used them for some reason? Do you think multiple scribes were penning these names, each individual writing in their own language and style?
I think the simplest explanation is someone owned/had the VMS available when the 'secret' to its reading was already lost. He could not make sense of it but recognized the zodiac symbols, so he annotated the manuscript with the corresponding names of the months. Why did he use such weird names? Here too the simplest explanation is that those were the names of the months as known to him (which, if true, gives a clue about the region he may have originated from, which, alas, does not help much in discovering where the VMS itself came from). He was not necessarily literate, maybe he could just barely write and with lots of orthographic errors.
The only other possibility I can think of is the forgery hypothesis: a deliberate attempt by the forger to mislead. But it fares badly in respect to the 'month names as known to him' hypothesis, because a forger going to such depths of inventive and imagination (and research, and time) looks weird to me, and I can discerne no reasonable purpose in doing it, so I don't say this is impossible, nothing not logically forbidden ever is, but it's quite improbable. It would imho require a maniacal forger, so we need a forger (more or less) out of his mind and we enter the realm of unfalsifiability. And if one considers all the remaining physical evidence we have (from the stains to the bindings to the rest of the marginalia... a very long list) the level of detail is astonishing for a forgery, while it's immediately and naturally explained by a manuscript with a long history.