RE: Why and how the text could be Bavarian
JoJo_Jost > 7 hours ago
Cipher Part 2. Work in Progress
Assumptions
Why these cipher structures could also fit Bavarian
Let’s look at the two possible prefixes qo / o. We observe:
After qo, a Gallow follows in almost all cases (under ~90%). After o, this is much less strict (around ~60%).
After qo (and almost always after o), exactly one Gallow follows immediately — never two, almost never three. In general, multiple Gallows within a single word are rare.
Gallows tend to occur near the beginning of words, especially if we treat qo and o as prefixes.
Thesis: In Standard German, articles appear as separate words before nouns. In spoken Bavarian, however, articles are often cliticized to the following word (i.e., written onto it in informal spelling).
Examples: das Haus (“the house”) → s’Haus (with "da" omitted); die Katze (“the cat”, feminine) → d’Katz.
English shows that a single function word like “the” can cover a broad range of contexts.
If qo / o are prefixes, they likely form a function-marker class. This class might cover not only article-like clitics (d’, s’), but also frequent bound elements such as g’ in g’schaut (“looked”), or linking particles / conjunction-like material (e.g., “and”).
This still needs to be disentangled: which marker corresponds to which function.
One possibility is that o is a more generic function-marker, while qo may encode a compound (e.g., “and + determiner”, or a fused prepositional phrase such as in dem / an dem / zu dem / von dem). In English terms: “in the”, “at the”, “of the”, etc.
This kind of fusion is also part of formal German spelling: "von dem" is officially written as "vom" - a good cultural parallel for “function material merging into the word”.
When function words (articles, prepositions, conjunctions) are not written as separate tokens but are attached to the following word, the following happens: the many extremely short words a normal German/Bavarian sentence constantly uses (“der/die/das”, “in”, “zu”, “von”, “und”, “im”, “am”, “vom” …) disappear as a separate word-length class. They are not gone – they are simply embedded in the prefix area of the next word.
Thesis: Gallow structure and consonant clusters
In historical scribal practice (and sometimes also in cipher practice), word-initial vs. word-final positions can be treated differently. A simple illustration is the long ſ vs. short s: long ſ tends to occur at the beginning of words/syllables, while short s often occurs at the end.
Applied to Bavarian/Upper German: many words allow hard consonant clusters at the beginning (which I treat as candidates for some Gallow-classes), while endings are often more reduced / less salient and could be handled by “softer” body ciphers (interestingly, also written smaller), e.g., EVA d y r m, etc.
Typical Bavarian initial clusters include: pl-, kl-, tr-, kr-, dr-, scht-, zt-, pf-, kn-.
Word endings, by contrast, are frequently reduced (phonologically and orthographically).
This aligns well with the idea that Gallows preferentially occur near the start of words (after function-prefixes such as qo/o), and it fits the overall positional behavior seen in the VMS.
Thesis: qo behaves more like an article/determiner or fused prepositional marker, whereas o behaves more like a general linker / function-marker.
And this ties the first and second theses together:
qo (determinative / prepositional complex?) seems to “pull” a hard class-marker (a Gallow) very strongly - (often in noun-like contexts)
o (more general function marker) is more flexible: it often precedes a Gallow (~60%), but it also frequently precedes non-Gallow material (i.e., “softer” word bodies).