(29-12-2015, 12:02 PM)David wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Remember there are only 25 glyphs, which aren't enough for a shorthand notation such as you envision.
That's a good point also.
Well, frequent occurrence in the beginning of a paragraph and no (if I am not mistaken) occurrences in the end of the paragraph is a peculiarity that makes us think of the specificity of the set of gallows (as opposed to all other characters).
However, let us consider standalone labels. The latter are a valuable object for observation, because most probably they stand for single plaint text words - thus the problem of "Voynich spaces" does not present itself in the case of labels.
What can we see in labels with respect to gallows? We can see that:
- a label may contain a gallows
- a label does not have to contain a gallows
- a label may contain more than one gallows
- a label may contain at least two different gallows
- a label may contain at least two similar gallows (with no other gallows in between)
The second and the fourth observations somewhat undermine the concept that gallows are some "keys" or "markers" (such as those introduced to mark the encryption scheme in use that may change from word to word).
Of course, this is not utterly decisive. One may argue that if a label does not contain a gallows, then the encryption scheme in use (in this word) is designated by a gallows situated somewhere else (e.g. in the previous label). Further, if a label contains two different gallows, then this might mean that the encryption scheme does change within a single word.
But the last point is decisively against the "marker hypothesis". There is no sense in marking the same encryption scheme twice in the same word.
What adds against the "marker" hypothesis is the presence of combinations like f69r, line 3, word 2. Here the t gallows is clearly not a standalone character, but part of a combination with e and a horisontal crossbar (taken together they will represent a c). Interestingly, the benched gallows are put down not as in this example. Rather, the legs of the gallows extend towards the very baseline (which makes us wonder whether they are single complex characters or sequences of plain characters).
Anyway, if not markers or shorthands, the gallows appear to be characters. But then we are back to this strange behaviour in respect to paragraphs.
