Absence of the Symbol Resembling '4' in the Very First Folio 1r

[dashstofsk]

The symbol resembling '4' has usage that varies wildly throughout the manuscript. The herbal section uses it sparingly, the bathing section uses it a massive amount, the astro/cosmo sections barely use it, and the zodiac section uses it almost never.

Perhaps it helps to visualise use of qo as a word prefix by looking at its frequency by quire, illustration type, hand and cluster. The quire 1 and herbal pages have it least. Hand 1 doesn't like it generally. It seems to have been a favourite of hand 2 when writing the bio pages ( quire 13 ). Yet curiously hand 2 chose to use qo sparingly when writing the herbal pages, despite the fact that hand 2 always wrote in the 'B' language.

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But there is another prefix that has even greater variance, cho. Have a look at the frequencies by cluster. It is used by 10% of words in the herbal pages by hand 1, but only by 2% in the herbal pages by hand 2, and 0.2% in quire 13.

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