(13-05-2019, 09:20 PM)Mark Knowles wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP: I would be much more emphatic in saying there must be a relationship i.e. in both cases we have a "4". I think when it comes to the extension on the top of the 4 I think it is most likely that is just a drawing error. Similarly if you draw enough "4"s then some of them will look like "q"s due to drawing error, so I doubt that any of them are "q"s, but from what I have seen the vast majority look clearly like "4"s. My point was that I think this question is amenable to objective analysis. Obviously this point applies to all gallows characters with a left hand top loop.
I don't think the extended ascender is necessarily a drawing error. There are places in the manuscript where there is a long vertical without the crossbar and it doesn't look accidental.
As for the q being rounded or triangular, I don't think we can assume that's a drawing error either. It MIGHT be meaningful but it also might have no meaning at all. When people draw P it is sometimes round and sometimes triangular and it doesn't matter, because the character is recognized anyway by shape and context. Some letters can vary significantly and still be recognizable. There's a difference between a drawing error and a simple variation to a part of a letter that is not specifically meaningful.