(02-10-2016, 02:25 AM)ThomasCoon wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.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 (less than 100) where <qo> comes before a benched gallows. 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).
...
Consider this as part of your analysis... a letter is sometimes inserted under the bench, between the gallows and the end of the bench. It doesn't happen often, but it happens often enough that I'm pretty sure it's deliberate rather than some kind of error correction.