22-07-2017, 10:08 PM
Quote:
- by the scribe – this could be the case with okeeo-raiin
Worse than that, the scribe could have been a mere copyist not understanding where he should place a space and where he should not.
Quote:Personally, I consider the evidence of scribal inconsistency in spacing as a hint to some kind of agglutination, but they might just be errors or whatever.
The worst case is the copyist's errors.
Quote:The numeric example you propose would make the nearby occurrence of the totally unrelated okeeoraiin and okeeo-raiin purely coincidental
Unless there is a "space error" either in the label or in the text.
Quote:But of course, I am always biased by my implicit perception that the text is meaningful at all....
I have no doubt in the text being meaningful. Too much effort - and, to all appearance, hidden meaning - put in the imagery for the text to be meaningless.
***
With respect to the "space problem", a much more favourable case (for our researching the VMS) would be the case when the observed spaces really do not matter, and there is some other mechanism in place to designate the "real" plaintext spaces.