• If you look very closely at the variations, it suggests the possibility that P-shaped gallows may not have started out as P shapes. If you take EVA-k (which is a common scribal shape) and bench it, and shorten the leg on the right (row 8, col. 8), it's almost a benched P. The internal consistency of the gallows constructions suggests the possibility that the designer may have started with one or two more common shapes which, in turn, inspired the less common ones.
  
• It is particularly important to notice that P shapes have the little loop ON THE RIGHT. This detail is never discussed, but I think it's very important. No one writes P this way (I looked at hundreds of alphabets)—the little loop is almost always on the left—even medieval calligraphic pees rarely have a little loop on the right. But little loops on the right DO occur with significant frequency in scribal conventions where the loop is added as an abbreviation. This, along with other clues suggests, once again, that the gallows and benched gallows might not be glyph characters, they may be combinations of scribal shapes, and they may not be inspired by any particular alphabet outside of Latin, they may be a SYSTEM of glyph combinations, as was true of the entire scribal-abbreviation system—once you learn a few basics, you can combine them any way you like.
  
• It has been said that gallows characters are never adjacent in the VMS. This isn't true, plus I suspect some of the adjacent ones have been "hidden" in a sense, by combining them. Some of the fancy gallows appear to be embellished, but SOME of the combinations look like they have been stacked (see the last column in the chart). I think the one top right is a benched version of EVA-k followed by EVA-p. The one just below it, in row 2, looks like unbenched versions of EVA-k followed by EVA-p. But look at the next one, in the third row, the p-shape is above the k shape, not to the right of it, it is stacked differently, so perhaps in this instance, it represents Eva-p followed by EVA-k, instead of the other way around. Everything about the VMS glyph set is systematic. This too suggests that it's a set constructed by someone with an orderly mind. Considering how much of the VMS alphabet already is Latin characters and Latin scribal conventions, including positional similarity to Latin scribal conventions, the less common shapes may simply be constructed of more common ones combined to suit the designer's needs.
  

(16-06-2018, 02:01 PM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP, If we stipulate that Eva-k could have been formed from I + tis = Item, do you have any clues as to how the basic one legged gallows could have been formed?

FWIW while looking at the Visigothic manuscripts I came to similar conclusions i.e  
1 p never loops that way (on the right) no matter what abbreviation is added
2 VMS p does not even look like a p
3 In any case p was on a descender
4 The nearest feature of interest was that capital T loops to the left with a spur on the right.
5 The characters with tall ascenders such as b,d, l etc all had spurs on the top, not loops.

I was thinking maybe with a cursive script we could get some loops but never on the right of the p. OTOH there were lots of the long macrons.
This was all irrelevant to the immediate task of finding a 100% accurate wild copy of the 4 basic VMS gallows.

TLDR I agree that the gallows look constructed. Maybe I should look again with that in mind.


Visigothic docs examined were from 600 - 1300AD with most round 850 - 1050AD. It was spine tingling to examine stuff that was old at the time of the Norman Conquest!