I have not correlated these variations with the Currier hands. I’ve avoided looking at Currier’s hand designations because I wanted to study the hands on my own and then compare my list of “hands” with his to see where we might agree or disagree. I definitely see more than one hand and the differences between the first two are distinctive enough that I’ve been able to document them (I’ll post my results in a future blog).

As for the variations in the glyphs, I’ve spent countless hours trying to differentiate handwriting variations from meaningful variations, going through every glyph in the manuscript several times and running the numbers on where they occur in relation to the line, paragraph, and other letters. As far as I can tell, the length of the tail on the one-legged ascenders doesn’t appear to be meaningful (I only say this with about 75% confidence) but whether it has a straight or a curled tail (especially the ones that touch the stem at the end of the curl or reach to the baseline) seems deliberate and might be meaningful. Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to do a full survey of whether these differences are specific to certain hands. It’s on my “to do” list.

Even if we knew for certain that a curled tail and straight tail are intended as different, we still have to figure out whether these are visual variants, as in Arabic, where a medial letter and a terminal letter might have different lengths, but retain the same essential meaning, or whether they are meaningful variants, as in Hebrew or Malaysian languages, where a crossbar, foot or curl might represent a different letter or syllable. I’m sure many have noticed that the two-legged ascenders almost always have feet (and the lack of a foot might be haste in penmanship), but that EVA-r sometimes has a foot and sometimes doesn’t in a more deliberate way that *might* be meaningful (I haven’t had a chance to do a statistical examination of EVA-r to see if the footed glyphs are surrounded by discernible glyph patterns that confirm whether the difference is significant).

The long ascender on the “4o” (EVA-qo) illustration shown above appears to be deliberate, rather than natural variance in the pen, and, something I didn’t post is a few examples that are drawn the same way that don’t have the crossbar, but which lend support to the possibility that the long stem is a form on its own (in the sense of being a “component” of other glyphs). I have NOT been able to determine yet whether the round 4 and the sharp 4 are deliberately different, but more than one scribe wrote them in both ways and some of them vary in shape within the same line or paragraph, so there is a possibility that they are intended as different.

Something I didn’t mention in this blog, because I didn’t want to stray too far off the ascender topic, is that EVA-y (the glyph inspired by Latin “9” abbreviation) may also have two variants, one with a curved tail (of various lengths) and one with a straight tail. In the case of ciphered text, distinguishing some of the characters by small variations in shape that might be overlooked by an uninformed “reader” allows for the inclusion of null characters to help disguise the overall look of a script without changing the number of glyphs that make up the cipher “alphabet”. I don’t know if the VMS is ciphered text, but the 9 is much too frequent and positionally constrained to be analogous to natural language. If it represented two different sense units, depending on the orientation of the tail, then the frequency distribution and positional statistics change.

One note about the organization of ascenders in the chart… I probably should have put the “gap” ascenders next to the Right Touch/Left Touch group because I suspect that’s where they belong. The fact that they exist, and that the gap appears clear and deliberate, supports the impression that a “touch” glyph and a crossbar glyph are two different forms. If I can spare the time, I’ll upload a revised chart later today.