[Article] A new Timm & Schinner publication regarding the Malta conference

[Torsten]

I wrote the two related web pages around 2000. Any later dates can only have been a minor update.
But in any case that is irrelevant.

The relevant statement "The very common character combination qo is almost completely absent in the zodiac pages and the rosettes page, but appears everywhere else." was added in 2016 (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

Textual statistics (frequencies of characters, words, combinations) were not an input to the handwriting analysis of Lisa. 

There is no doubt that Lisa was aware of this sentence before her first paper was published, as she cited this statement earlier at the BSA Annual Meeting in 2020 (see the video from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. minute 31).

She may have pointed to them to indicate some correlation,

Lisa unmistakably argues that these statistics would confirm her scribal distinctions: "External evaluation supports these scribal distinctions" [Lisa Davis 2022, p. 7]. But since these statistics were known beforehand, such an argumentation is not feasible.

Anyway, the entire debate surrounding external evidence supporting the scribal identifications only becomes necessary due to a contrast between the observations described by Lisa and our own findings. According to Lisa a horizontal crossbar for EVA-k indicates that the quill had been lifted after completing the vertical (two strokes), whereas a bowed crossbar more likely is the result of writing the glyph with a single stroke. To our "untrained" eyes "the variability of writing EVA-k appears very consistent throughout the entire manuscript: For nearly every page it is possible to find instances of EVA-k written with bowed and with horizontal crossbar, respectively. Additionally, on nearly every page some instances of EVA-k show an overlap between vertical stroke and crossbar, also indicating two strokes." (Timm & Schinner 2023, p. 8 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). 

If we were mistaken it should be easy to provide a page-by-page documentation for all the instances of EVA-k written in one stroke that we might have overlooked. By providing such documentation, along with an explanation clarifying why all the instances of EVA-k with an overlap between vertical stroke and crossbar do not necessarily imply that the quill had been lifted after completing the vertical, this could effectively resolve the entire debate.