vague thoughts for an approach

[dashstofsk]

There is a character that appears only at the end of a line. Is there any idea for a good reason?

Within the manuscript many strange things seem to happen at the ends of lines. Also when a line is split by a diagram ( frequent in the herbal pages ). In many of the herbal pages the writing seems to finish right at the very point when a diagram starts.  A coincidence, or the result of artificial padding? You will see this clearly, for example, in f15r, f26r.

It seems that when the writing was approaching a diagram or coming to the page edge and the writer could see that he was running out of space he would often do a number of things:

• Fill the remaining space with a small word. s, dy, or, am, oky  are frequent.  oky  occurs more often at a line end than would be expected if the text was a continuous narrative with words wrapping to the next line if there was no more space. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. were all those small words really necessary around the fork of the plant stems?
  
• Squeeze the last words together and eliminate the gap between them. Is  cholalaiin  in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. really one word? Or  ototaykal  ( You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. )? 
  
• Truncate a word.  m  seems to be a popular character for this. But some of the ‘hands’ use it more than others.
  

From what I can see the line end behaviour and a lot of other variations in the text of the manuscript could be explained by different personal styles and preferences of the writers. Most likely knowing that the text would be undecipherable they did not feel it important to be precise or to follow any particular writing standard.