[Article] New Paper: Subtle Signs of Scribal Intent...

[asteckley]

Is it correct that, if there is an underlying mechanism, it suggests the generation of text rather than content-related text ? In other words, shouldn't a text consisting only of meaningful content be free of the characteristics described above ?

I think it is possible to be meaningful content and yet still have certain tokens chosen more often (or less often) by the scribe simply because of he wants to to work around the drawings or margin lines.   The scribe might, for example, be inclined to use a shorter word with an equivalent meaning -- or an abbreviated form of a word -- when there is not enough space left to accommodate  the original word.  The likelihood of this might be strengthened if we observed that word tokens with an affinity for positions just before a drawing (or right hand margin) were all shorter than average (and aversive ones were longer than average).  But that is not apparent to any significant degree in the current data; looking at the tokens BEFORE a drawing in particular, there is no apparent correlation of the length of the token and its type of propensity (i.e. tilt).

On the other side, say the content is meaningless (whether generated by some rules that produce statistical structure or not), then the scribe is not even trying to use words for their meaning or to consistently follow any rules, so he may at any time just select a token of suitable length to achieve aesthetic effects. There too though, we might expect to see some more distinct correlation with length.

I am in the process of compiling a database of the physical widths of words (and glyphs) and of the spaces between words, between words and drawing, between words and margins, etc.    This may provide data for other related analyses of these ideas.