Identifying function words

[Emma May Smith]

Were [o] a noun marker then there would be a high number of words starting [o] which don't take [q] frequently. For example, many words starting [ol] occur but have low rates of [q]. Furthermore, we would still be left with a problem as [ch, sh] don't even take [o] often.

Not sure if I understand your point correctly. Do you mean, e.g., that we have olor, but do not have qolor?

While qo- is the overwhelming prefix containing q (count of 5289), next to that are qe and qc (66 and 23, respectively). So maybe that's a set of function elements, with qo- being the most predominant of them.

Anyway, I definitely like that idea about q. The point about it is that not only it is infrequent in labels, but also that it is much more frequent in Currier B. But that might be explained by the nature of the texts of biological and recipe sections which just might require "and" quite often. I wonder whether there is any difference in q frequency between botanical A and botanical B.

Yes, my point is that you can't have words starting [q] without the same words starting [o] (that is, same minus the [q]), but you can have words starting [o] without high numbers of [q] counterparts. The dependency is one way and conditioned significantly by both [o] and the character following [o]. The ratios of [q], [o], and plain forms are broadly predictable.

While [qe] and [qc] are interesting insights into how [q] works, they are such a tiny fraction (1.7%) that I don't think they represent a set of functions based on [q].

I'm not really keen on the idea of [q] as 'and', partly because it's just speculation presently quite seriously. There's a lot we don't understand about the character so it seems premature to assign it meaning. I'm not sure who first proposed it but I wish it was put to rest.