Hi Barbara,
In your detailed examination of the script, have you noticed that frequently the 'legs' of the gallows characters appear to have been drawn in halves? It's as though one or two short strokes were drawn for the foot/feet, and then the top half added in a separate movement. Sometimes there is a small gap in the middle of a leg, sometimes a kink, sometimes a slight overlap. In some cases the second 'foot' of a /t/ or /k/ looks like it started out as an /e/. Of course I don't know what it means, but it struck me as a strange way to have written these characters. Maybe using a quill forces one to use a writing style which seems illogical to someone who's never tried it - what do you think?
I have a jpg of various examples, if anyone's interested.
Jon.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Barbara Barrett [mailto:barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 12 February 2004 14:33
> To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: VMs: Evita, EVA, and transcriptions.
> Importance: Low
>
>
>
> > >Knox knocked;
> > >Evita considers each of the EVA characters
> > >f, k, t, p, ch, c, sh, s, ai, al, am, ar, ee, eo, e,
> > >in, ii, i, od, ok, ol, or, o, d, h, l, m, n, q, r, y,
> > >more or less, to be a discrete letter,
> > >many or all of which represent something else,
> > >likely in an inconsistent and varying manner.
>
> > Nick noted;
> > Yet... I personally find it strange that "ok" is considered to be a
> > composite letter but not "qo" or "dy" - or even "ot", for
> that matter.
> > "ai[i][i]n" also seems to cause some problems here. Curious... :-o
>
>
> Barbara babbles;
> Transcription has concerned my lately because of my quill and
> faux vellum
> document-hand experiments, and a very high quality 4-colour
> print of f75r.
>
> The print is of such quality that one can see where the
> quill, stopped, or
> paused; began or ended a stroke; when one line over-tops
> another etc, the
> and the direction of quill travel.
>
> for example there are two base elements that I'll call "c"
> and ")" and its
> combinations of these 2 elements that create EVA; s b and y; Are these
> really separate characters, or are they eva "e" with
> semantic, vocalic, or
> phonemic, modifications? Should they be considered as 4
> separate characters
> or as a single character with a modification? This seems
> plausible as the
> ")" element (and its placement) also define the differences
> between EVA n
> and r as attachments to EVA i. Likewise sometimes EVA "i"s
> are joined, as
> are EVA "e"s (at the bottom) - are these meaningful graphemes
> in their own
> right?
>
> I've also noted a character, very similar to EVA k but which
> unlike the two
> strokes k is single a stroke character - but the single
> stroke character has
> no EVA value.
>
> Likewise from a construction point of view there are three
> very different
> diacritics that can go over EVA "ch". I call these "arrow" (point up
> right/stop/ down right), "teardrop" (point start/ up left,
> curve to return,
> left down and stop over point start), and (borrowing EVA terminology)
> "plume" (leftward drawn spiral but sometimes more open than
> ")" ). EVA only
> seems to recognize "plume" and that not as "ch+plume" but as
> "sh" suggesting
> an s+h digraph but if the overbarred double c (EVA ch) is a
> single grapheme
> in its own right then the diagraph suggestion is probably incorrect.
>
> Because the construction is very similar is there a
> difference between my
> ")" and the "plume"? Certainly I've found them as apparent
> attachments to
> EVA a and EVA y. Which *suggests* to me that they are
> modifiers/additions of
> some form. e might be a single phoneme, and b, s, and y make
> be syllabics!
> It'll take some experimentation to determine which is which ;-)
>
> Then again construction suggests that the ligature of EVA qo
> is the same as
> EVA t, difference being that the former is a descender and
> the latter an
> ascender of the same letter. Likewise EVA m and k may also be
> positional
> ascender/ x-height variants of the same character: but then
> I've encountered
> .
>
> Allot of these things which experimentation suggest can be
> tested once I get
> the full manuscript facsimile. To use frogguy for a moment if the 4o
> ligature is always the word-initial form and 4P is the medial
> and paragraph
> initial form, then finding 4o in medial or final position or 4P in
> interparagraph intial position will demolish this idea.
>
> I'm chasing more slides for the quality of their reproduction
> (one can see
> things not present in the digital scans) and having the BBC
> doc transferred
> to DVD because the close up digital rostrum camera work will
> provide even
> better examination of the characters on some folios.
>
> Certainly examining the vms from an epigraphical perspective
> means that EVA
> just doesn't cut the mustard. EVA may well have captured the relevant
> graphemes, but only by making assumptions such as joined "e"s or "i"s
> shouldn't be considered separate graphemes. But
> epigraphically it is only by
> comparing the epigraphical structure or the grapheme elements to the
> phonemic assumptions of EVA that the relevance of apparent
> "modifiers" can
> be determined.
>
> By this I mean I'll have to devise an epigraphical
> transcription system and
> run it through the entropy programs etc to see if the results
> make more or
> less natural language sense that the EVA results.
>
> This will take years <slump>, and many re-runs with and
> without repeated
> words to test if they're just orthographic indicators.
>
> I'm also coming to the conclusions from facts like most
> labels begging with
> the EVA o that each character on its own may have an
> orthographic/grammatical indicator value when used initially.
>
> OOOOOH me 'ed 'urts guvnah!
>
> Barbara
>
>
>
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