Lines interrupted by drawings

[RenegadeHealer]

Marco, was the raw data for this study one of the ingredients for the project you and Emma published earlier this year? I'm still in the brainstorming phase for my vord-generating dice model, but I'll definitely be citing this paper when I publish the final results, because it's been a helpful resource for understanding how vords seem to be formed.

I was immediately reminded of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that the different plant-delineated text columns on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. show different ink density, suggesting that they were written separately, and thus are true columns functionally and methodologically. Your data here supports the idea that text before and after a plant drawing constitutes two separate lines, not one interrupted line. As someone who has looked at a lot of old manuscripts, how precedented was this style of column composition in medieval manuscripts of the time?



A long hard look at your histograms (with Thievery Corporation's "Langue Symbolique" playing in the background) made me notice something: vords in all positions but line-first can start with [ch, sh, and a]. On the other hand, [p, t, y, and s] tend to only begin a vord in the line-first position. Emma May Smith makes a convincing case on her blog for [y] and [a] being equivalent, with the difference being positional. Among other things, a vord that would begin with [a] will instead begin with [y] if the first vord of a line. I wonder if a similar line-head transformation rule governs vords that begin with [ch] or [sh], such that (for example), a vord beginning with [ch] needs a [p] attached to the beginning, becoming either [cph] or [pch], while [sh] needs [t] attached to it, or something like that.

I also wonder if [p, t, y, and s] are, in many cases, not really part of the vord they seem to be attached to at all, but are really just index markers with no space separating them from the line they mark. I've read the discussion about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and its strange separated vertical column of glyphs. Since then, I've noticed that scanning down nearly any Currier B folio's left edge, I often see the same 2-3 glyphs many times over, almost in a repeating pattern. Acrostics are another thing that come to mind; a lot of ancient and medieval Hebrew writing makes clever selection of line-start characters so as to serve as both a line-indexing system and a hidden acrostic.