06-06-2025, 10:02 AM
(06-06-2025, 09:41 AM)dashstofsk wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Because the authors are not obliged to have to write to any specification or style or format and can write what they like and may have decided on those occasions that they would like to write those characters and in their haste started to write them and then only half way through noticed oops not enough space to write them and then said to themselves oh too bad it will just have to come out funny and most probably no-one will ever mind given that no-one will ever be able to understand what we have written.
I guess until the manuscript is decoded or somehow conclusively proven to be meaningless, there is no way to argue against this explanation. Which to me is its main weakness: if there is no way to prove it wrong, there is no way to prove it right either.
On the positive side, I agree that the author appears to be at certain liberty when choosing glyphs, but I don't think this is due to the lack of rules, I think it's because of the rules. Say, if encoding certain plaintext is possible using p or using Sh, the scribe would rather use p where there is a lot of vertical space and sh where vertical space is restricted. And sometimes mid-paragraph they would miscalculate.