(26-05-2026, 09:08 AM)ReneZ wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My main point was that there are a great majority of possible changes that are (apparently) forbidden.
This existence of a very large set of relatively strict rules strongly suggests, that there is still something else going on. It is not just a matter of creating meaningless words based on small changes to previous words.
The rules are non-trivial too. A relatively simple (potential) change from e to a is allowed in some contexts but not in others.
One can introduce a f intruding in a ch, before a ch , but not before one or two e 's.
Etc, etc.
The context-dependent constraints you describe — "e to a allowed in some contexts but not others," — are the glyph-design rules Schwerdtfeger documented in 2008 (see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 10). They follow from the stroke-level structure of the writing system. They're not mysterious — they're the visual grammar of how strokes combine.
But more importantly: you can't argue that a modification is "forbidden" based on its absence from an incomplete text. Folios are missing from multiple quires. The most common word in Currier B — "chedy" — would look like an exception if we only had Currier A pages. Every "forbidden" combination you identify might exist on a missing folio or simply reflect a path the scribe didn't take on the folios that survive.
I prefer to analyze the text the scribe actually wrote rather than speculate about the texts he didn't write — since that number is endless.
But more importantly: you can't argue that a modification is "forbidden" based on its absence from an incomplete text. Folios are missing from multiple quires. The most common word in Currier B — "chedy" — would look like a forbidden form if we only had Currier A pages. Every "forbidden" combination you identify might exist on a missing folio or simply reflect a path the scribe didn't take on the folios that survive.
I prefer to analyze the text the scribe actually wrote rather than speculate about the unlimited number of texts he didn't write.