RE: Evolution - was VMs: Inks and retouching

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004, John Grove wrote:
> 	Now, although there are a couple of stand-alone 'i' endings without a
> formal end-stroke, I'm willing for now to consider that an 'i' does not
> exist by itself. It is always part of the following character. This isn't a
> fact - it's an assumption on my part. So...

This much does seem to be widely accepted.  Stolfi's Note 17 rfers to
ih-bracketed gallows sequences, i.e., ikh, ith, iph, ifh, but suggets
these may be equivalent to ch-bracketed gallows sequences.

> The same goes for the b, eb, eeb, eeeb, eeeeb, etc... They are all
> single glyphs.

I'm still getting used to b, which looks like c + bottom attached uphook,
i.e., a variant of o - maybe word final?  However, I'm not clear on the
extent to which flamboyance of the "endings" is random or significant.

> Hopefully, Gabriel's references to the eva 'u' will clarify my point on
> the i-series with 'n-type' endings beginning with the eva 'u', then eva
> 'an', 'ain', 'aiin', 'aiiin', 'aiiiin'... you have a series just like
> the 'b' line above.

I can certainly see this.

> The 'n' might always require an 'a' to start it off - I haven't checked,
> but I don't recall any 'n' that isn't preceded by an 'a'.

Consider some examples grepped from the L16+H-EV files:

oiin, soiin, roiin, qooiin, ...
chiin
okiiny, polkiin, qokiiin, ...

I didn't look for ei+n, because by your logic ei would be a
transcriptional variant of a.

> EVA 'r' doesn't follow the same rule as eva 'n' though as there are
> plenty of 'chor' type words.

If the endings act like vowel points in consonant-dominant scripts like
abugidas or abjads, and the e*i* sequences act like consonants, then a
preference for ai+r sequences would indicate a statistical preference for
certain consonants before certain vowels.

Note that taking this approach to identifying consonants and vowels
indications inverts my initial suggestion on recognizing these.  I don't
have a particular scheme in mind, only a class of schemes, and Grove's
graph-based analysis makes it look more likely e endings are vowels.

Taking Grove's approach, I am still baffled by h, q, the gallows
structure, embenchment of gallows by ch, sh, and maybe ih, and so on.  I
don't actually see any difference between c and e in this approach.  Or in
any other, for that matter.

If the constraint on c and i graphs is that c's occur before i's, then
there shouldn't be any cases of aa or or ae+.  However, there do seem to
be a few aa, and a fair number of ae, aee, etc.  There should probably
also be no ac, albeit c occurs in the difficult to accomodate bench
sequences, e.g., sachy, shackhy, okacfhy, ...
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