VMs: Initial Gallows, again...

[Ken W <ken@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I been digging through older posts trying to catch up and inspired by 
Marcio's post from February:

"I have noticed that out of all VMS pages, only a handful do not start with one 
of the four gallow characters. Making an analogy with English, for example, 
it is like we had a 200+ page book on which all pages started with, let's 
say, C, F, M or P. Not impossible, but sure it is strange."



So here are a few observations for what they're worth:

There appears to only be 13 examples of a folio NOT beginning with 
gallows.  In these 13 occurrences:
8 times a gallow shows up merely following a <o>
2 times a gallow is preceded by a letter combination ending with <o>
1 time (f77v) a gallow is preceded with <qh> and no <o>
2 times there is no leading gallow (f82r and f102r2)

f82r is the odd one.  Considering the pattern, I looked at this folio 
again.  Is it just an artifact of the image or does it appear that the 
first word on the folio is written in a different ink? (The text after 
the illustration break also appears different)  Without this word, this 
folio would follow the patter of a leading "diphthong" with an <o>.

This made me look at the labels (particularly in the zodiac section).  A 
VAST majority of the gallows are preceded by an <o>.  What's it mean?  
Who knows.

Ken


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