07-08-2026, 10:41 PM
(07-08-2026, 07:22 PM)ololololo wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The symbol z looks like a small version of k and appears very rarely in the manuscript. I counted it 3 times; only 2 are present in the transcription by Tahakasi. It appears once in Botany (f17r), f58r–f58v, and on the diagram f67v1, and it is repeated twice in the word.
A glyph that is that rare can be assumed to be an "error" or simply a variant of some similar glyph. It will not be this simplification that will prevent us from cracking the manuscript.
Imagine that you are transcribing a book in Latin script but an unknown language and you notice that the letter "K" appears only three times in the whole book, while "H" occurs dozens of times per page. You decide to transcribe those three "K" as "H". Will that make any significant difference when you try to identify the language?
Besides, a case can be made that those "mini-k"s are indeed just k gallows. While there may be few instances that are that small, the vertical size of the gallows seems to vary by a factor of 2 or more. On that same text ring there are some ks whose "head" fits entirely inside the framing circle, and some ks whose "head" lies well beyond it. Are those two distinct "letters", too?
All the best, --stolfi