The Impossibility of Double Gallows

[-JKP-]

So JKP are you saying the slant is more important than the presence/absence of the descending tail?
Sometimes there is a tail but not much or no slant. Sometimes there is a slight slant but no tail. 
I'm now completely confused about m and z.

Edit: nablator I forgot about the g character, but I guess now we can add it into the mix of characters that barely differ from m.

It depends. In some cases, the slant doesn't matter at all. But here's the problem. Let's say you were adding the loop (which in Latin most often stands for "is" suffix) and you were adding it to an "r" or you were adding it to an "i", it might be difficult to tell which one it is supposed to be... so... some scribes would lean back the "i" (or alternately the "r") in order to distinguish them. And... in some cases, they didn't care. They wrote them both the same or both ways.

The long tail (beneath the loop) does matter. It signals that it's an abbreviation (rather than a ligature). The length of the tails varied a lot, but most scribes lengthened the tail when it was an abbreviation.


So... if you see the shape without the descender it's more likely to be a ligature. If you see it with a tail, it's more likely to be an abbreviation. The slant, well, that's scribe dependent but is sometimes an important distinction (and sometimes not).