Why not positional variation?

[dashstofsk]

what's going at the top-right corner of f3r? "daimm"

I take it you are curious to know more about the funny character  m. This might be a good opportunity to say something what I think might be happening. In my opinion  m might be the same as  r. There are several pieces of evidence that led me to this possibility.

Firstly have a look at some matrices of affinities for characters. Here they are, for the Herbal A1 pages and for the Bio B2 pages.

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You will notice that the values for the character pairs  ar,am,or,om  are all high. What is this thing that I call affinity? It is a measure of the liking that each character in a pair has for the other character. Thus when the measure for  ar in Herbal A1 is 5 this means that  ar occurs 5 times what would be expected if characters  a  and  r  appeared randomly. In Bio B2 the value is 9.21. Neither  r nor  m have any particular affinity with any other character. These affinity values immediately suggest that there is some commonality in the two characters.

Now list the top  m words and then count the words in which  m is replaced by  r.

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Generally you will see that where there is an  m word there will be an  r word, and that the top  m words generally give top  r words. Again, commonality.

Also there is the visual evidence. From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

   


Both characters start with a downstroke and have an upwards loop from near the top. The difference is that  m continues the loop with a downward swing. Otherwise both characters have the same 'body'. In both the top loop has the same forward lean. Why the downswing? I suspect that it might be just a particular whim of the authors. All of them tend to like to finish words with a flourish.  l,y,r,n  are most frequently placed at the end of a word. But also perhaps it pleases the authors to occasionally close a line with a visual kick to emphasize the ending. And we all know that  m occurs generally at the line ends. Definitely so by hands 2 and 3 who write in language B. Hand 1 ( language A ) likes to use it mid-word also ( notably f3r, f3v, f24r, f24v, f52r, f54r, f54v. But notice also a strange thing, that of these, pairs f3r/v and f24r/v and f54r/v are on opposite sides of a page which suggests that the author might have done the pairs in one sitting. )