(28-02-2016, 02:57 PM)VViews wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
And I guess we can now add "upside down Chinese characters" to the list of what these weirdos may be, since Stolfi apparently believed all three to be inspired by them, as well as his concluding remarks that:
"it could be a Hindu monogram, analogous to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. Turned sideways, it could be a scribbled abbreviation "C~"for "Chapter", atop the Roman numeral "CII". Or..."
LOL!
Considering how common they are in medieval manuscript without rotating them in any direction, I find this rather "imaginative". I'm not averse to the idea of looking farther afield (it's an interesting journey) but there's no need to go far to find them.
The V-shape is found in Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Latin manuscripts and the squiggle is a common abbreviation for "er" (sometimes "ir") and is used other ways, as well. I've seen the seagull in Spanish and Arabic documents (I think I may even have seen one in a Syrian document but unfortunately I didn't screensnap it so I'm not 100% certain) and the upper right one resembles many embellished initials, especially in some of the older documents, c. 13th or 14th century.