RE: VMs: Image Source, Accuracy of Transcriptions

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 09:35 29/08/2003 +0100, Jon Grove wrote:
> > In any case, if these gallows are merely ornamental,
> > then either they are like 'nulls' or they are
> > like beautified versions of other characters.
> > A consistent explanation has not yet been found.
> > Maybe there was no consistent 'rule'.
>
> In a number of places, it appears as though the gallows characters were 
> drawn in stages, so that the bottom halves of the 'legs' were drawn 
> separately from the top halves. I observed this in a number of places - 
> sometimes it looks as though the pen paused, sometimes as though there is 
> an actual gap in the lines, sometimes just a 'kink'. Could it be that the 
> gallows are, at least sometimes, ornaments to standard /i/ or /e/ characters?

Based on the observation that, as Philip Neal and others have pointed out, 
the single leg gallows often appear not only on the first line of 
paragraphs, but also in spatially near pairs, my working hypothesis is that 
these represent a form of split gallows - ie, a two-legged gallows split 
into two ornate single-legged halves, almost certainly signifying some kind 
of textual structure contained between them.

Even in those rare cases where they appear in mid-para, they often appear 
in pairs: f30v line 8 (contains "o aiin") and f33r lines 4-5 (contains "ar 
aiin s"), for example.

It might well be a good exercise to try and isolate all the examples of 
these single-leg pairs through the VMS, to see if there are any patterns 
common to them all.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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