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

[asteckley]

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 understand what you are saying there. And that particular interpretation of the word intent did occur to me.

I'd have to think about how to measure it, but one way to test this might be to ask how often "words" to the left of drawing elements are prefixes of other words compared to...the average word (but hapax will bias that)? other words of that length?

Thoughts?

Karl

I think that's an excellent idea.
I think there are a number of interesting analyses that could be done on morphemes (besides the many things tried by people to date). I had started a bit down that road but have about 3 other related projects on the go at the moment.  One thing I wanted to do first though was establish a clean (i.e. objectively analyzed) lexicon of the morphemes, and identifying the main set (as in the top 80% or something, so as to remove the least common).  And then parse the corpus from one of the transliterations (such as the ZL one) into morphemes.    My current software system maintains an entire corpus as separate detailed tables of folios, lines, tokens, and glyphs. This would add a fifth table of morphemes.  Once at that stage, performing a number of statistical analyses, involving attributes such as position relative to drawings and margins, etc. becomes very convenient.