(21-05-2026, 04:01 PM)Dunsel wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quite simply, in human terms: does the word “look right” within the current local family of forms being copied?
The whole idea of the copy-mutate system, if I understood @Torsten correctly, is to formalize the process, to be able to make testable predictions, etc. Otherwise we can just say "scribes were writing this way just because they were asked to write something like this or just because they felt it looked right" and that's it. Essentially, after using this escape hatch the copy-mutate system becomes the same as the glossolalia hypothesis, automatic writing and similar. I suppose even without physically looking at past pages, many people have very good visual memory and even spontaneous meaningless writing may repeat past patterns easily, so in a sense all kinds of pattern following include copy+mutate part.
I see two possibilities for where copy+mutate research leads: either some well defined rule based reasonably simple copy+mutate system successfully explains most statistical properties of the text, which would mean that the scribes actually used something similar to this precise rule-based system. Or scribes mostly relied on their intuition, visual patterns and imagination and even if the process included looking back and reusing past patterns, there will be no way of identifying the process exactly, in which case we can't really learn much from copy+mutate formalizations. Is this correct?