Re: VMs: VMS EVA ii combinations (fq2b.zip: 7k)

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 01:02 20/12/2003 -0700, Dana Scott wrote:
> Hmm. I wonder if there is some confusion that pairs of characters that 
> seem to go together in the VMS (e.g. 4o) are being referred to as a single 
> glyph made up by the combination of two distinct glyphs put together? I 
> haven't thought of 4o, for example, as a single glyph, just as I don't 
> think of qu in English as a single character, though rr and ll and ch in 
> Spanish might lean more towards the single character concept than qu.

AIUI, the reason GC started talking about glyphs was that he (probably 
rightly) felt frustrated when people took the EVA stroke transcription as 
meaningful for the purposes of statistical analysis. (Convenient, yes - 
meaningful, no). My interpretation of "glyph" is therefore that of a 
coherent (typically separate) shape on the page (which GC felt people were 
losing sight of), which is most relevant for the VMs because of the 
upright, non-joined-up (OK, non-ligatured) nature of its hand(s).

For example, strike-through gallows (like <cfh>) typically present as a 
single shape - so, this would be a glyph made up of multiple strokes. AIUI, 
Jacques would call the paradigmatic case (of [say] <cfh> a "glypheme", and 
particular instances of it "alloglyphs" (which is fine) - still, I think 
that, for talking about shapes in general (typically, without identifying 
them with particular paradigmatic glyphemes), "glyph" is probably just 
fine. (Calling a shape a "morph" would be much, much worse). :-)

AFA <qo> goes: I (personally) wouldn't claim that (because the <q> and <o> 
are often ligatured) they merge to form a single glyph (shape). My argument 
is more about the similarities between many of the frequent pairs we see in 
the VMs (like qo, dy, ol, or, (etc)) and the pairs of (fake) letters you 
see in verbose ciphers (which is, conceptually, the next level up from glyphs).

> I hope this isn't creating some confusion, though certainly single 
> 'characters' are made up of multiple and pen strokes as when using the 
> accent mark over certain letters in the Spanish alphabet. For instance, 
> something like the plume over c in the VMS might be considered a single 
> character or glyph.

The troubling thing about the <sh> "plume" is that it has so many subtle 
variants (tear-drop, small, large, left-side, right-side, arch, etc) - too 
many, I'd argue, for them all to be artefacts of inconsistent scribal 
practice (or do I mean scribble practice?) :-)

The plume is often (but not always) a separate stroke from the <ch> beneath 
- but the total shape is almost certainly a single glyph. Now, before Larry 
(or someone else) jumps in to list the (few) cases scattered through the 
VMs where a similar-looking plume occurs elsewhere - yes, I do know there 
are exceptions. Perhaps if we first work out what the crushing majority of 
cases mean, we might be able to understand the others too. :-o

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


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