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+--- Thread: Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective (/thread-4874.html)
RE: Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective - oshfdk - 09-09-2025
(09-09-2025, 09:25 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You all seem to count direction-changes and stops as different strokes.
No, I count a stroke each time the quill is lifted off the vellum and moved to start writing elsewhere. With my somewhat limited (but nonzero) experience with the quill, the below seems to me to be the most likely way the letters in my image above were penned (quilled?):
This is the way I would write them with a quill and the way the strokes taper and the flicks (serifs) appear at the bottom of the straights lines suggests to me that this is indeed the way it was written. From my experience when writing with a quill you have the range of about 120 degrees of possible direction of movement before you have to rotate your hand in an uncomfortable way to keep the quill from splitting, or just limit yourself to a hair thin line with the very tip of the quill. All the strokes above vary in width and appear executed with some gentle pressure, so I would expect all of them to go roughly in the same direction.
The above is according to my amateur experience, maybe professional calligraphers will disagree, I don't know.
RE: Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-09-2025
(09-09-2025, 09:25 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You all seem to count direction-changes and stops as different strokes.
I define strokes in terms of the mechanics of writing the characters. A stroke starts when the pen touches the parchment and ends when it lifts off it.The Beinecke images at 100% or 200% magnification usually show these events quite clearly. (And they also show that the pen had a square nib. And, where it was about to run out of ink, we can see the broad strokes split into two parallel lines, as the tines open up under the pressure.)
I believe that the mechanical aspects of the writing were more important to the designer of the alphabet than the final shapes of the characters. Our modern view of characters as bitmaps or filled spline curves may lead us to forget this point.
All the best, --jorge
RE: Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-09-2025
(09-09-2025, 10:12 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.With my somewhat limited (but nonzero) experience with the quill, the below seems to me to be the most likely way the letters in my image above were penned (quilled?):
I agree with most of your "diagnosis", except that I believe that the plumes of r and s were drawn the other way - starting at the top of the i and moving up, with light pressure.
The plume of n is definitely drawn this way, except that it starts at the bottom of the i. Thus, while conceptually n is two strokes, like r, it actually can be written with a single stroke -- and in many cases it obviously was, as it has a round bottom instead of the expected sharp corner.
In my view, those cases where the plume of r or s seem to have been drawn from the top down are cases of late retracing. Retracing in the wrong direction makes those plumes thicker in the wrong places and "uglier" than original ones. (That is why in the Chinese and Japanese scripts the order and direction of the strokes is part of the definition of each character.) Indeed I consider those malformed plumes an important indicator of retracing.
All the best, --jorge
RE: Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective - oshfdk - 10-09-2025
(10-09-2025, 02:19 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree with most of your "diagnosis", except that I believe that the plumes of r and s were drawn the other way - starting at the top of the i and moving up, with light pressure.
It is certainly possible. A plume often makes a whole 360 degrees turn and a large part of it is of the same width, so it could be written in either direction with about the same effort. What is not possible in my experience is making two thick strokes going in opposite directions without some very awkward repositioning of the quill or the hand (so, I see no way to write a typical a in one stroke, even when both the top and the base are merged).
One thing that speaks in favour of your interpretation is the misalignment of strokes in s in my previous image. If s was written in one go from the top down it would be natural just to do it in one stroke. Here it was obviously done in two strokes, because the end of the plume crosses the top of the base.