Labels: What on earth is an "otaly"?

[-JKP-]

A much more straightforward hypothesis, which really does not need any superfluous explanations, is just that labels are not IDs.

I'm in sympathy with this possibility and have often wondered what else they could be (pointers to a section of text? reference numbers? quantity numbers? verbs on how to use something? or what to use it with?).

I've suggested a couple of times that they might be fragments, that they might go together with the other fragments nearby, rather than being stand-alone.


Of course, they could also be ultra-abbreviated. If the word Androsaema (a plant) and Andromeda (a constellation) were abbreviated the same way (e.g., andro or andr or andra), they would look the same, and probably be understandable to the person who wrote them, but would stand for two completely different things. It would work for labels, but I don't see how this could be generalized to large blocks of text without it turning into a one-way cipher, which is why I always start leaning back toward fragments (or something else).