The "gallows" characters

[crezac]

The idea of gallows being used as articles is a possibility.  I would point out that this doesn't mean that spaces aren't spaces.  They are and whatever gallows are won't change that.  What it actually means is that words aren't words. 

It means that rather than encoding phonemes the characters are possibly being used as sememes.  Each glyph could be conveying semantic information and it's position in the glyph-group/word/string could change its meaning.  Rather than being articles initial gallows could be a semantic marker that say "This is a noun" or "This glyph-group is about earthly things". The gallows anywhere else in a glyph-group could have a phonemic value in some positions or a modifying semantic meaning in others.  This feature could also apply to glyphs which aren't gallows.

Or its possible it has both a semantic and a phonemic value.  (For example word in English that start with GL frequently refer to light or the eye.  Glossy, glassy, glare, glimmer, glance, etc. So GL is phonemic (two phonemes technically) in English, but there is a semantic aspect to GL as well, and this goes away if it's not at the start of the word UGLY, IGLOO, ANGLE.  It's not a rule in English, but the existence of the pattern means in could develop as a rule elsewhere.  Loan words obviously can break the pattern, but if you had a rule rather than a pattern you probably wouldn't adopt a word that broke it.

Anyway, if glyphs work this way they could encode a great deal of information, especially if repeating a glyph changed it's meaning too.