The gallows intrusion, the baseline jumps and multipass

[pfeaster]

Regarding the coordinate system, when I looked for the structure of narration back in 2015, I introduced L-coordinates and P-coordinates (short for "line" and "paragraph", respectively), wherein the value of the coordinate is the ratio of the number of the line (or paragraph) in question to the total number of lines (or paragraphs) in a folio. One could do the same for characters in a line. I'm not sure offhand, if it makes sense to use relative (as I did) or rather absolute coordinates in the analysis that you propose. Maybe it makes sense to use both.

I've just now discovered this thread and have been finding it very interesting indeed.  I'm sorry I didn't see your writing about L-coordinates and P-coordinates earlier, since I'd have liked to acknowledge it as prior work in my posts about "rightwardness" and "downwardness."

There's a spot on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that might contribute more fodder for this "multipass" discussion:



I'm interested in the vord in the middle that seems to begin [choi].  There's a problem with it: namely, an overly long stroke descending from [l] in the vord [okol] in the line above it has intersected the [i] of [choi] in the exact place that would ordinarily have taken a flourish to turn the [i] into some acceptable vord-final glyph such as [r].  As a result, the usual way of completing [choi] has been blocked.  The solution seems to have been to write another separate glyph afterwards -- a very strange-looking glyph, and possibly a unique one, beginning something like an [s] or [r], but with a horizontal base, and ending with the flourish of [m] or [g] (it reminds me of the [r]-like glyph seemingly inserted above [a] on f24v).  Given the combination here of an unusual situation and an unusual glyph, I suspect the latter functioned as a substitute for a flourish added to the [i] of [choi] itself.

But if that's what's going on here, then what order would it make sense for the marks to have been written in?

If the scribe was looking at the page while writing, and if [okol] had already been written when (s)he wrote [choi], it seems unlikely that [choi] would have been allowed to overlap the descending stroke in such a problematic way.  So perhaps the line containing [choi] was written first, and the line above containing [okol] afterwards.  But if the whole line containing [choi] had been written first, there would have been no obstacle yet to completing [choi] in a more typical way, as [chor] or whatever.  So to make sense of what we're seeing, we might need to posit at least *three* steps: (1) writing the lower line up to [choi]; (2) writing the higher line up through and including [okol]; (3) finishing the lower line, starting with the completion of the unfinished vord [choi].

Alternatively, the scribe might have been unsure when writing [choi] how the vord should end, and then had to take special measures to complete it only after working this out and discovering that the stroke descending from [okol] was in the way.  After all, [choi] could probably still have been completed as [chol] without messiness or ambiguity.  It's [chor] that would have been a problem.