Deconstruction of benched gallows

[ThomasCoon]

I know that we have a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on gallows characters but I have a theory about benched gallows (cKh, cTh, cPh, cFh) that has statistical support.

In my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I showed that <qo> is followed by <k> or <t> 80% of the time in the VMS corpus (4 out of 5 times). It is followed by <l> only 5% of the time, <e> 2% of the time, and <ch> less than 1% of the time. So, there is a clear pattern:  <qo> comes in front of a gallows character.

There are a very small number of times where <qo> comes before a benched gallows like [cKh] or [cTh]. So there are three options for interpretation:

• 1) The benched gallows can be deconstructed as <qokch> or <qotch>, which makes statistical sense (qo before gallows is normal).
  
• 2) The benched gallows can be deconstructed as <qochk, qocht> or <qoeke, qoete>, but all of these combinations together only appear 9 times in the VMS.
  
• 3) The benched gallows are independent sounds, but they rarely follow <qo> (about 1.7% of the time, or less than 1-in-50 times, that <qo> is used).
  
• EDIT: Anton proposed a fourth system You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (which may or may not work in conjunction with #1 or #2)
  

The first option is the most statistically likely, and in addition, there are plenty of times where a benched gallows and its [gallows+ch] equivalent are interchangeable, which also lends support to option 1:




So, I would conclude that the benched gallows are really [gallows followed by ch], but I could be wrong and I'm open to counter-arguments