Decomposition of the "gallows" characters

[Emma May Smith]

Yes! I have noticed them too.

But by far the most interesting specimen is f1r. In the third paragraph, second to last line, half way in. It seems to be a compound of [q] and [p]. Curiously, it is in the right place for a [q], and there is another gallows character in the same word, which isn't very common*.

Was this a mistake, an experiment, or what? And what could it mean?

One possibly concerning [q], though at this moment speculation, is that it is both a kind of gallows characters and an enclitic word such as "and". If we imagine that the word for 'and' had a main sound, such as /n/ in Bantu languages, then gallows could have sounds like /n/, /m/, /ng/ and so on, while [q] is a modified version designed to sit at the beginning of a word. In that way, [t] could stand for the sound /n/ in general, while [q] (just half the character) could stand for /n/ as it is found in Bantu languages to mean "and".

*It seems to be perfectly acceptable to have two gallows in a single word. The total number of such words runs into the middle hundreds. It isn't the usual structure though, so this is interesting.