Experiment: how would you transliterate the following glyphs?

[Koen G]

Thanks for the responses everyone! I thought for a while how to visualize this and came up with the colored squares below. A different color basically means "person thinks something else starts here". The greyed out squares are uncertain, unclear or missing responses. I probably made a few mistakes, but this should give an overall impression of the situation.

   

I got 11 responses. Out of those, I could not color a single identical row. However, if we ignore pfeaster's one uncertain square, he and nablator answered the same. I believe these were also the people wo most explicitly communicated their choices using EVA, which I suspect may be relevant somehow. Zobowiazanie's choices were similar to theirs.

Overall we see three blocks. Everyone agrees 1-6 are the same glyphs, and there is similar agreement about 14-15-16. As expected, everything in between is a bit of a mess.

Now, this exercise was not meant to determine how these glyphs should be read. As Marco also told me, some familiarity with the manuscript's writing system is required to judge some of these. And it can certainly help to see them in context.

Some people also told me that I'm pulling my punches and I could have found way more confusing examples. This is certainly true, but I didn't want to look through the manuscript to compose the most confusing sequence. I simply selected two folios from Q20 (f103r and f112r) and quickly composed a gradient of 8-shaped glyphs from them.

What prompted me to do this ties in to bi3mw's observation about the way these glyphs are drawn. Sometimes it looks like the scribe draws an "8" like I would, but sometimes it looks like they draw a "c"-shape first, the attach a counter-clockwise loop with a tail to it. This is the shape that could (and sometimes clearly wants to) continue into EVA-g. I find these two ways of writing "8" bizarre (though Wladimir says there are apparently even more). If the scribe regularly writes what we see as EVA-d in a manner that can be extended into EVA-g, and indeed a continuum appears to exist between the two (see 7-13 stats above), then might they be the same glyph? And if they are, then that means that the scribes used positional variation, which might have an impact on much more important glyphs than EVA-g.

Here is the image from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia again. If you were to transcribe this, both of them would be [n].