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

[kckluge]

This is a really nice piece of work, congratulations on it.

I had done some similar word length distribution analysis on the Bio section ('cause also a single dialect and scribe) that I never wrote up for the forum. It looked at the N-th-but-not-last and last words on lines, although I didn't get around to doing chi^2 values. Because the length distributions are long-tailed to the right, I used the mode rather than the mean for the "average" length -- summary of the results was:

Types: mode at L=5 for N <= 8 and last word on line, at L = 4 for N = 9 & 10 (relatively few lines have more than 11 words)

Tokens: for N = 1 modes at L = 3 and L = 5; for N = 2 to 4 mode at L = 5; for N = 5 to 10 mode at L = 4; last word on line mode at L = 3

Karl

By the way, quick clarification -- those experiments used the Currier alphabet rather than EVA. Also, my preliminary results not only need to be checked for statistical significance via chi^2 values (given the sample sizes, I'd be surprised if they're not), but also need to be checked by looking at different manuscript sections and different transcriptions to see if the same effect occurs.

I want to push back slightly on the use of the term "intent" as implying that the scribes are choosing shorter words to make them fit before the drawing element or for some reason achieve a given line length. If one thinks (as I do) that spaces are inserted in some algorithmic way and that the algorithm operates at the level of lines (or interrupted lines), then last words will tend to be shorter for no other reason than because they're the left-over bit of text at the end.

I think the importance of last words on lines being shorter on average needs to be emphasized, because any theory regarding how the text was generated needs to explain it. Consider something like Rugg's proposed grill method -- I'm not sure why there would be anything special about last words on a line if that was the mechanism.

If it's really the case that average word length shifts based on word position in the line (correcting for the effect of the result regarding words-before-drawing-elements from asteckley's paper), that's potentially a whole other world of hurt for everybody's hypotheses.

Karl