(2 hours ago)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view./k/ and /t/ do not always behave alike.
They are not completely alike, but they are quite similar. So lumping them into a single "tike" meta-symbol is a reasonable option when doing character-level statistics.
In fact, when doing this sort of study, one should begin by "projecting" the data down to the smallest "space" where
some insight can be obtained. If one tries to work with all the variables at once, one easily gets a big pile of numbers that one cannot digest. There will be seven hundred and fifty anomalies and asymmetries in the numbers, all demanding attention.
I am well aware of the
pe x
te puzzle, and the hints that
p is somehow related to
k and
f is related to
t, rather than the other way around as one would expect from the loops. But by collapsing them into puffs and kites, and ignoring the e modifiers, we can clearly see some things that we could not see if we tabulated all 14 gallows types separately.
For instance, from that table it is immediately obvious that the relative frequency of tikes (%ct) in the body lines is remarkably constant across all sections, independently of the "language" and "hand". That is a hint (not proof, of course) that tikes have a phonetic value whose frequency in parags text is independent of the topic. Is the
k/
t ratio constant too? That is a separate question that can be investigated separately.
That table also shows that the frequency of puffs (%cp) in body lines varies by almost a factor of 3 between sections, just among the larger ones. That is a hint (again, not proof) that the use of puffs is strongly dependent on the topic. It would be compatible with the theory that puffs are embellished versions of tikes and/or other glyphs. Like capitals in modern English, outside of headlines and sentence start: they are used for proper names, hence some texts may have many, other texts may have none.
That table says nothing about the
te x
pe puzzle; but, again, that is a plus. That puzzle can be investigated separately, by statistical experiments focused on it.
In fact, there was this old suggestion that the hooks at the end of the horizontal arms of the puffs may be their missing
e modifier suffixes. EVA does not record this distinction; I don't recall whether this decision was much discussed, much less justified. So I recently spent several hours going through all the puffs in my transcription file, checking them against the BL images, and changing p/f to w/z when they had hooks. (I suppose that this data is already available somewhere, maybe in the GC transcription; but I decided to do it myself, for various other reasons.)
I should now do some statistics on this data to try to confirm or disprove that old idea. But I have been postponing that project because I am afraid that I will be sorely disappointed. While doing that re-coding, I felt that the hooked/straight distinction was not well defined, not even to the level of the
a/
o distinction. And that the hooks seemed to be present simply where there was space for them. Thus I am afraid that they are indeed just meaningless calligraphic variation...
But there is another way to investigate that "hook is e" theory: it is to lump {
t,
k,
te,
ke} into a single "e-tike" meta-symbol, and
p and
f into a single "puff" meta-symbol, and see whether the two meta-symbols have the same next-glyph statistics. Preferably after deleting all {
a o y} and collapsing {
r s} into one...
All the best, --stolfi