Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Dunsel]

I'm still trying to understand why so many possibilities. For example: where is suffix a after ch if hapax are excluded?

It comes from cha, which occurs twice in Scribe 1, at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f42r. I'm using the Takahashi transcription.

The text on f8r.18 is "...daiin.chor.cha.r,cheal,cha,m".  I can't understand what the Scribe did there, but there is a gallows from the next line intruding into the space between "cha" and "r".  It s almost certain that the intended words were "...daiin.chor.char.cheal.cham" (or "...daiin.chor.char.cheal.chaiin" if you share my belief that m is an abbrev of iin).  The word ".char." occurs 77 times in my transcription, and the word pair ".chor.char." occurs twice, not counting that one.

In my transcription of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there is no "cha" as an isolated token.  But my decisions at what is and is not a space differ from Takahashi's.  Can you give the line number and/or quote the context?

All the best, --stolfi

Takahashi  <f8r.P3.18;H>      okar.cphaiin.chaiin.eldaiin.chor.cha.rchealcham

Zandbergen/Landini retain that cha but the transcription itself shows the ugly boundary.

Takahashi  <f42r.P1.5;H>      qokar.chockhy.chotor.cha.kary

Zandbergen/Landini has it as qokar.chockhy.chotor.chy.kary.

That means both Takahashi occurrences supporting CH→A as a suffix are questionable for different reasons. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. occurrence has the spacing problem you pointed out, and the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. occurrence is read as chy rather than cha by Z/L.

But, I'm no paleographer, I'm simply a number cruncher. I report on the data I find and let others with more experience tell me what I should be crunching. The ledger will never be perfect because the transcriptions don't always agree, particularly on things like spaces and ambiguous glyphs. All anyone can really provide is a best reconstruction from the available transcription.  

So for cases like these, I would simply treat them as transcription or segmentation uncertainty in the data. Takahashi gives two occurrences of cha, so that's what the ledger records. Looking at the individual cases tells us that CH→A probably shouldn't be regarded as a particularly well-supported transition. That's the data I have so that's the result I report.

But if you step back from individual questionable cases and look at the larger transition structure, that's where the ledger starts becoming interesting. A handful of uncertain readings don't create the overall pattern. The pattern comes from the thousands of repeated transitions that aren't in dispute.