Rotating decoration on gallows f42v

[MarcoP]

By the way, a very simple question: Why are most, first letters of a page gallows ?

If they are simply letters of words, the grammar of the underlying language might have an unusual structure or unusual habit.

Consider this (copied from Wikipedia):

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca.

If we expect the subject noun to be the first word, it should have more variety, instead of most-times-gallows. I don’t know if there is any language that mark the noun as subject by adding a prefix. If that is the case, the initial letter might do have less variety than we expected.

Hi Zhe,
as discussed by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (and others, I think), there is evidence suggesting that paragraph-initial words are generated from other words by attaching a gallows character as a prefix.
In my opinion, this is compatible with what you propose here, but incompatible with the other hypotheses you list. In particular, there is no evidence that paragraph-initial words are particularly frequent (nor particularly rare, actually).

Sometimes it is observed that Grove Words are unique. About 57% of the Grove Words in the Stars section are unique in the whole manuscript, and about 85% are unique in the Stars section. But about 65% of all words in the Stars section are unique, and a potentially higher percentage for the manuscript as a whole (the figures are hard to count due to words with difficult readings). We cannot consider Grove Words to be substantially different from the text as a whole on this count.