q as waw?

[Emma May Smith]

I just looked quickly at the first 20 pages of the Herbal (1v-10v) and counted where [qo] appears:

[qo] directly before a gallows: 84 times
[qo] not directly before a gallows: 25 times

Because of these statistics, I'm not sure I agree that  [q] or [qo] mean "and" - there seems to be a disproportionate preference for Gallows characters (3 to 1)

That's a good observation.

I suppose one counter is that any word taking 'and' must be a noun. What if gallows were more common in nouns than other words?