Astrological symbols?

[jsbien]

Please have a look at the two lines from Zaborowski's treatise (https://cyfrowe.mnk.pl/publication/24392Cimelia, p. 55; seems to be
down at the moment):


He discusses Parkosz's treatise (cf. #27) using two characters

which I interpret as 'WHITE SQUARE' U+25A1 (Unicode comment: used in astrological contexts for aspect square) and 'FEMALE SIGN' U+2640 (Venus in astrology).
Do you agree with this interpretation?

[psb1558]

I would think so, but it's hard to be sure about the square without seeing more of the context. I wonder if there's a copy of Zaborowski available somewhere else? What's the title and date?

[psb1558]

Thanks for the file! He's explaining that a square (quadrum) is used by musicians to signal a major key (durum) while a b-like sign is used for minor (molle). A few lines down, it appears that the printer is doing his best to reproduce the "sixth vowel," which should (probably) be an o with a broken line (see below), but the closest he can come (not very close!) is the ancient symbol for Venus.

Here's the passage in a later transcript (p. 86):

Apparently nothing to do with Astrology!

[jsbien]

Still the question is where the square came from. Do you see any other reason besides astrology to cast this type/sort?

[psb1558]

Well, clearly he's got the Venus sign in his font because of its astrological uses. I don't know much about the square. Was a shape like that really used as a musical symbol? (It doesn't look much like a modern sharp sign.) If so, it could be from a set of musical symbols. But it could equally well be from an astrological set (since the typesetter has gone to that drawer for his vowel symbol). I'd have to look at some early printed astrological books to decide. Do you have references to any of those?

[jsbien]

As for musical notation the information is available e.g. here: https://books.google.pl/books?id=TMdf1SioFk4C&lpg=PA5&ots=1KoYwu2T2j&dq=b%20rotundum%20quadratum&hl=pl&pg=PA5#v=onepage&q=b%20rotundum%20quadratum&f=false . I will look for astrological books.

[psb1558]

Alas, Google Books decided not to display the most relevant page for me. Maybe I can get this through our library.

[jsbien]

As you quoted another edition. do you have any idea what could be uses of the o with broken line slanted backwords? The o's with the line slanted forward have been used in Polish and even recently added to Unicode.

[psb1558]

The sentence reads (I think) "The sixth vowel of the ancients was thus: ♀." It seems to be part of a theoretical intro to the tract proper, on correctly spelling the Polish language. I suspect one would turn to the ancient grammarians (Priscian, etc.) for more info, but I'm way outside my wheelhouse here.

[jsbien]

The ancient means "ancient Polish", i.e. Parkosz and the vowel is Polish specific nasal one. It's proposal was handwritten and most printers since 16th century up to now don't have types to render it correctly (in the most recent 20th century edition the characters has been written by hand and pasted into the the printed matrixes to be further used by photooffset I think). So the Venus sign is just an arbitrary replacement of the missing character. Below is the fragment of the Harvard Dictionary of Music mentioned earlier:

[psb1558]

Okay, interesting. As the edition I posted the screencap from was modern(ish), it would be interesting to see the early edition it was copied from. Too bad there aren't more editions online!

[jsbien]

The earlier editions in DjVu format are available here: https://github.com/jsbien/Zaborowski-index4djview. I can upload here the relevant fragments.