Implications of the continuity of Currier "languages"

[nablator]

Quoting from the same blog post:

I think the key to resolving this is to grasp that there is some kind of generative or confounding principle at work within a rigidly predictable framework. That is, that even though there are lots of rules, these rules act as a kind of “container” for semantic or cryptographic variability to exist within.

Even though there may well be some rigid rules, the existence of a large set of evolving rules is problematic: unproven and difficult to use in practice. All the discovered rules have exceptions. No one has been able to characterize anything with a set of rigid rules, only probabilistic ones.

In my opinion a better explanation than an evolving set of rigid rules (or probabilistic rules, even more difficult to tweak in practice) would be that the scribe(s) sometimes chose to try something new and then stayed on (recently) beaten paths as much as possible in order to increase the effectiveness of the "confounding principle". Instead of rules we are mostly seeing personal temporary preferences.