Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective

[Jorge_Stolfi]

You all seem to count direction-changes and stops as different strokes.

I define strokes in terms of the mechanics of writing the characters.  A stroke starts when the pen touches the parchment and ends when it lifts off it.The Beinecke images at 100% or 200% magnification usually show these events quite clearly.  (And they also show that the pen had a square nib.   And, where it was about to run out of ink, we can see the broad strokes split into two parallel lines, as the tines open up under the pressure.)

I believe that the mechanical aspects of the writing were more important to the designer of the alphabet than the final shapes of the characters.  Our modern view of characters as bitmaps or filled spline curves may lead us to forget this point.

All the best, --jorge