(29-02-2016, 03:19 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(28-02-2016, 08:34 PM)Sam G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[...] I've wondered if the scribe (who I think was a copyist) had trouble distinguishing between <d> and <j>, and if there should actually be more instances of <j> in the text.
If there was a scribe / copyist, and particularly if he had no opportunity to check back with the person who created the original or draft, then all sorts of interesting things could have happened.
Just imagine that Eva-k and Eva-t were one and the same character, but not written very consistently. The scribe could have decided that these were two different ones, and always wrote it clearly as one or the other.
D'Imperio makes a point about this: they do appear to be written clearly as one or the other, yet in the 4 times repeating 17-character sequence there is one character which is written twice with the extra 'hook' and twice without, as if they are equivalent.
I can think of arguments both for and against this idea.....
The most obvious argument 'for' is the near-replaceability of the two characters. The 50% figure that was computed before can be checked statistically. I've been too lazy to do it, but it would work as follows.
Assume that they are the same, and replace all 't' by 'k' in the MS.
Now make the list of all words with a 'k'. (One can decided whether or not to count the embedded gallows as well).
All the words in this list that appear only once in the MS will add to the fraction: 'not replaceable'.
The number of such words can be guessed from Zipf's law, but could also be counted.
Of all words that appear twice, statistically half will be replaceable and half 'not replaceable'.
Of all words that appear three times, statistically one fourth will not be replaceable, etc. etc.
This assumes that the choice k vs t was made by the scribe with a 50/50 probability. With a different ratio, other fractions emerge.
It would seem interesting to see how the ratios behave especially for these lower-frequency words, and how close the ratios are to the expected figures for a random process.
To me the distinction between <k> and <t> seems deliberate. Off the top of my head, you're got the common cthol-cthor-cthy words in Herbal A, and many words containing <lk> (mostly in B sections), where if you swap <k> and <t> the words will be far less common.
On the other hand, in Herbal A for example you've got common words like okchol-okchor-okchy and otchol-otchor-otchy where it seems that they must be related in some way, but my guess is that the difference matters as well. I tend to think that the VMS language expresses some kind of "polarity" in this way - up/down, left/right, in/out, here/there, etc.
A similar thing seems to be true of <ch> and <sh>, which are highly "substituteable" in most cases where they are word-initial (chol-chor-chy, cheol-cheor-cheody, chey-cheey-chedy, etc.) but not so much when they are word-medial (<kch> and <tch> are much more common than <ksh> and <tsh>).
As far as potential copying errors in the text, another thing I've wondered about is if <r> and <s> aren't both representing what were originally two separate letters. I.e. there might have originally been an "r1" and an "r2", as well as an "s1" and "s2" which our scribe could not reliably distinguish, so he just wrote <r> and <s> for these pairs respectively.
It seems that both of these letters have two distinct ways that they can be drawn: <s> can be formed by adding a "tail modifier" either to EVA <e>, or to what looks more like EVA <c>, and there's something analogous going on with <r>, where the tail modifier may be added either to <i> or to the straight-stroke cousin of <c>, a character that shows up independently in the sequences of letters on f57v.
In most cases it's actually difficult to tell how <r> and <s> were drawn, but sometimes the scribe seems to deliberately emphasize one form or the other. It's hard to know exactly what to make of it, but it does seem possible that the scribe collapsed two characters in to one in the case of both <r> and <s>, and only occasionally distinguished them when he thought the difference was obvious or important. The other possibility is that they are actually intended to represent only one letter each, but that the scribe occasionally "amplified" minor variations in the original text by mistaking them for distinct glyphs and writing them differently.