Yesterday, 08:00 AM
I will now focus all my further research here in this thread, since it all relates to the Bavarian hypothesis and I am not allowed to mention the Bavarian hypothesis in "my" other threads. Structurally, I would have preferred to keep these results separate, but I accept the reasoning behind this restriction.
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I'm still working on the cores. The cores contain too little information for longer words, so my cipher produces too many short ones. This led me to revisit a basic assumption: that the written spaces are word boundaries.
If they are not, then a sequence like y-qo, which appears split by a space in the manuscript (...y (Space) qo...), could in fact be a continuous trigram "ypo" that the writer is concealing. In other words: there are word-end markers and word-start markers (we know that), and the writer may insert a space according to a rule whenever those occur. The result would be space placement that is rule-based rather than meaning-based. That would explain a lot.
Since word boundaries could directly related to line length, I tested whether line-initial glyphs correlate with the length of their lines, and whether they might encode information about how many words follow.
[attachment=15379]
3910 lines, EvaZ3b transcription, foldout and circular-text folios excluded (these cause distortions because they are not running text).
The four gallows in the LONG class are roughly equidistant: p->f -3.14, f->t -3.42, t->k -2.29. Mean step ~3 glyphs.
A similar step (~3.0) shows up between ch and o in the SHORT class.
The MIDDLE class is internally homogeneous (s, d, q, y, l all between 35.28 and 36.02 glyphs - range only 0.74 across five line-initials).
The gallows order by line length is the inverse of their corpus frequency: k > t > p > f by frequency, but p > f > t > k by line length when used as initial.
The rarer the gallow, the longer the line it heads. (for whatever reason)
Important: The effect is nearly robust against excluding first-folio lines.
What this implies: I don't claim that the initial glyph encodes an exact word count. Unfortunately, the variation within the class is too great for that. But there is clearly some structural information carried by the initial glyph beyond the obvious LAAFU patterns.
(Has this specific class structure been quantified before? References welcome.)
Then I looked at the end markers; more on that later....
J
---
I'm still working on the cores. The cores contain too little information for longer words, so my cipher produces too many short ones. This led me to revisit a basic assumption: that the written spaces are word boundaries.
If they are not, then a sequence like y-qo, which appears split by a space in the manuscript (...y (Space) qo...), could in fact be a continuous trigram "ypo" that the writer is concealing. In other words: there are word-end markers and word-start markers (we know that), and the writer may insert a space according to a rule whenever those occur. The result would be space placement that is rule-based rather than meaning-based. That would explain a lot.
Since word boundaries could directly related to line length, I tested whether line-initial glyphs correlate with the length of their lines, and whether they might encode information about how many words follow.
[attachment=15379]
3910 lines, EvaZ3b transcription, foldout and circular-text folios excluded (these cause distortions because they are not running text).
The four gallows in the LONG class are roughly equidistant: p->f -3.14, f->t -3.42, t->k -2.29. Mean step ~3 glyphs.
A similar step (~3.0) shows up between ch and o in the SHORT class.
The MIDDLE class is internally homogeneous (s, d, q, y, l all between 35.28 and 36.02 glyphs - range only 0.74 across five line-initials).
The gallows order by line length is the inverse of their corpus frequency: k > t > p > f by frequency, but p > f > t > k by line length when used as initial.
The rarer the gallow, the longer the line it heads. (for whatever reason)
Important: The effect is nearly robust against excluding first-folio lines.
What this implies: I don't claim that the initial glyph encodes an exact word count. Unfortunately, the variation within the class is too great for that. But there is clearly some structural information carried by the initial glyph beyond the obvious LAAFU patterns.
(Has this specific class structure been quantified before? References welcome.)
Then I looked at the end markers; more on that later....
J