(08-10-2019, 03:25 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Arca thanks, yes, for the different uses of the dots and for the reminder that reading aloud was very important in those days.
And... dots were used to mark numbers (since numbers were letters).
Exactly, I wasn't trying to correct anything, I was just trying to add more to the thread. Another use: some medieval scribes used dots to separate ingredients in medical recipes, sometimes instead of spaces and sometimes in addition to spaces, and those dots could be placed in the middle position as in Koen's example, or on the base-line.
I know that some of you here have spent a lot of time and effort thinking about the spacing in the VMS and the intention(s) of the scribe(s) and I think that that's a very good thing.
I can only report what I have observed when I transliterated the MS in the late 1990's, and I have seen character spacing of all possible sizes. I have basically noticed a continuum, and not a specific 'half space'. The same observation was made by Gabriel Landini, who did the same transliteration in parallel.
We used the comma symbol to denote 'uncertain spaces' (not half spaces) in our transliteration files. The dot / period for a space was already used much earlier.
A problem is that people tended to rely on 'known words' to decide which spaces were 'real' or rather intentional, and which not.
(08-10-2019, 05:10 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
A problem is that people tended to rely on 'known words' to decide which spaces were 'real' or rather intentional, and which not.
YES!
That was one of the problems I had with the Takahashi transcript. Too many assumptions that felt to me like they were based on expected patterns (like "cccc" couldn't possibly be right, no one would do that, so it must be "ccc" or "[insert single char here]" can't possibly stand alone, so I'll add it to the nearby token). I wanted to record what I saw, not what I assumed it should be.
(08-10-2019, 01:44 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I believe it is possible to read the half-spaces. You just have to become extremely familiar with both the script and the structure.
They follow patterns. You will see them more often after certain characters and between certain blocks. If this were not the case, I wouldn't even have mentioned it.
Are these half-spaces optional? Could they be a clue to some kind of internal syllabification (assuming that the creator had a way of pronouncing the glyphs, like EVA)?
Maybe syllabification, maybe a "block" structure with some other function.
Which one, I don't know, but I think it's a significant aspect of the text.
We must keep in mind that spacing is also variable in the marginalia. For example, the supposed "nim" looks like "m m" if you crop out the dot.
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The half-spaces in the VMS occur more frequently between certain blocks of characters, like in the examples I showed above and those blocks are common ones.
The whole reason we dot an "i" in "nim" is so it won't be mistaken for "mm".
Yeah, my point is that it looks like ni *space* m though. Why is ni a block?
But we don't know anything about "ni" because there is only one.
The difference is that the VMS is 200 folios and there is a pattern to the half-spaces that is associated with common blocks of characters.
(11-10-2019, 02:09 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But we don't know anything about "ni" because there is only one.
The difference is that the VMS is 200 folios and there is a pattern to the half-spaces that is associated with common blocks of characters.
I cannot confirm this from my experience.
Let me explain what I wrote before in a different manner.
Gabiel Landini and I have used in the past a comma symbol to denote an
uncertain space.
We discussed this issue for a while.
Had we not called it an
uncertain space, but a
half space, we would have ended up with two problems instead of one, because there are also intermediate forms between "no space" and "half space", and between "half space" and full space.
Furthermore, full spaces come at a variety of different widths.
I can imagine that a scribe would develop some standard distances between some character pairs, and these may look wider depending on each pair. If there are different scribes, then these habits could also be different for each scribe.