(no subject)

Interesting. According to this, I type 76 wpm.

76 words

Speed test

Reasons why Quadrata Texturalis is an abomination onto God and Man, #647

From Stefan’s Florilegium Archive, specifically the section on alphabets and Terry Nutter’s message of 10 May 1997:

If you work from the Pegge edition of Forme of Curye, you will find therein a recipe for Viande of Cypres that calls for oatmeal. Taken by itself, this is one heck of a puzzle. There are lots of other recipes in other collections for the same dish, none of which call for oatmeal. Virtually all do call for dates, which this one doesn’t.

Go to Hieatt and Butler, Cury on Inglysch, where this is recipe 100.

They worked from a bunch of surviving related manuscripts, of which eight (including one that Constance Hieatt found after publication, and described, along with a list of errata and additions to CoI, in a separate article). Of the eight, four call for ‘ootmele’ or ‘mele’ or something similar; one (fairly far removed from the original) calls for damsin plums, and the other three call for dates. At the same position.

What the heck happened?

It’s impossible to know, but here’s a simple conjecture. At one point in this collection’s history, a scribe was copying a manuscript. The recipe he was copying was supposed to say “Take dates”; but the “d” on “dates” had lost its ascender (either through aging of the MS, or by an error of the previous scribe), so he found himself looking at “Take oates…”

“Take oats?” says our scribe to himself — not a cook, and knowing just enough to get future generations into trouble. “They can’t mean fodder. Surely it should be oatmeal.” And he ‘corrects’.

…

A couple of other quick ones: there’s a recipe in Laud 553 (published in Austin, on page 113) titled “Cyuele”. This, by itself, is not particularly odd. (The medial “u” represents a “v” in this context, so it’s not a particularly implausible word.) The problem: there is no other recipe in the corpus titled anything like that — but there are two surviving recipes (in Diuersa Cibaria, published in _CoI_, and in an Anglo-Norman collection) called “Emeles” — and they’re clearly the same recipe as this one.

What’s going on? Someone who has studied the Laud manuscript directly tells me that it certainly does say “Cyuele” — and it’s hard to see how Austin could have misread “m” as “yu”. But look at it from the other direction: the Emeles recipes are earlier, after all.

In this general time frame, an upper case E is easy to misread as C. A lower case m is virtually indistinguishable from either in or iu. A scribe looked as “Em”, and saw “Ciu”, giving him “Ciueles”. That being (as he well recognized!) hard to read, he “simplified” orthographically by substituting a “y” for the “i”. And voila. Again, we can’t know; but it’s far more likely than the assumption that this dish had two distinct names that are so similar from a paleographic standpoint and so dissimilar from any other.

…

When the scribes of Europe discarded the beautiful, legible, and above all clear Carolingian minuscule for the increasingly terrible blackletters, terminating in Quadrata Texturalis, they imposed a totally artificial barrier to effective communication for hundreds of years hence. You know why we have a dot on top of our i? Because those idiots kept writing it in a way that made ‘minim’ a forest of indistinguishable vertical strokes, that’s why.

Grr.