q as waw?

[ThomasCoon]

Thomas - In that case I would argue that the "o" in itself is an article or something similar. In that case the surface appearance of "4o" as a meaningful unit would just be the result of "and" and an article being stuck to the beginning of words. I guess this ties in to the "gallows mark nouns" hypothesis.

Hi Koen,
Thanks for the post - It's definitely a possibility (who knows! I certainly can't disprove anything ). One obstacle that I foresee may be explaining why "and" (<q>) can only link words that have a definite article (<o>). In many languages, "and" can connect nouns without definite articles also, as well as non-nouns (two verbs, adjectives, adverbs). Maybe Emma knows of a language where "and" is constrained in this way?

[Koen G]

So would "o" be one type of article then, and 4o the other? This would explain de distribution as well as the fact that 4o is rare in labels. It is conceivable that some articles used in full text are not used for single words. Or are you thinking about a different type of words?

[-JKP-]

So would "o" be one type of article then, and 4o the other? This would explain de distribution as well as the fact that 4o is rare in labels. It is conceivable that some articles used in full text are not used for single words. Or are you thinking about a different type of words?

I've also wondered if it might be an article or noun designator or some other grammatical marker, but it also occurred to me that it might designate gender or some other dichotomy.

[Sam G]

The idea that qo might represent Arabic "wa-" has actually been suggested before:

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[Koen G]

Interesting Stolfi quote from Sam's link:

AFAIK, most of this also holds for other Afroasiatic (Hamitic/Semitic) languages like Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Geez, etc.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about these languages to say whether this is true... With Coptic, a form of Egyptian was still spoken until after the 15th century.

[Ruby Novacna]

I think "q" means rather "d", "qo" =do ou d'

[Koen G]

Ruby - do you think EVA "q" is the only glyph that represents "d"? According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., "q" appears at the beginning of words 99% of the time (quick calculation). Additionally, it does not (or hardly?) appear in labels.

That is why I agree with Stolfi and Emma that it likely represents something special. A glyph adopted for a special purpose, like an abbreviation, a loan, a grammatical function...

[MarcoP]

I think "q" means rather "d", "qo" =do ou d'

Hi Ruby, if I understand correctly, your idea is that EVA:q might be a "prepositional prefix": a preposition that is actually joined to the word it applies to. I think this is a good hypothesis, but I also think that (if this is the case) q- corresponds to an abbreviation for a syllable, not a single sound. 

As Koen wrote, if q- is just d (like an abbreviation of the Latin "de" , French "de"/"des"/"du" or Italian "di") it seems strange that it so rarely appears in words as the sound "d".

In French, d appears at the beginning of words about 50% of the times (about 25% of the times as "de"): it does have a positional preference, but nothing comparable with that of q.

[Ruby Novacna]

You have a great confidence in your letter frequencies, because you take for an axiom that the text is written in a single language.

[MarcoP]

You have a great confidence in your letter frequencies, because you take for an axiom that the text is written in a single language.

I don't follow you. If the VMS was written in multiple languages, letter frequencies would tend to compensate and become uniform. I can't see how multiple languages can explain the phenomenon we are discussing, unless you are referring to Emma's original proposal of the single borrowing of a specific letter (the Arabic waw) extraneous to the main language of the text.

How does your idea of EVA:q as d fit with multiple languages?