Zompist Bboard Again

Thanks for the extra text, I'd like to clarify a few things.

Glyphs in green I initially thought were new characters, but now I think they're actually handwriting variants. Red is new series, and yellow is existing series with new extenders.

The glyph in blue - is this two characters combined? If so, which ones? It doesn't look like much else you've shown us so far.

The character labelled 3 seems to be the base for two distinct series: 1, 2 and 5 have ascenders attached on the left, while 4 and 7 have ascenders attached on the right. Is 3 more related to one or the other set at all? And is there a curled ascender in the right-attaching series?

Glyph 6 I think is a handwriting variant of the 'ɔ' shape - just wanted to check it

All the things you marked as handwriting variants and new series are just that. Re: handwriting variants, this is more like how I usually write them when I'm not being super careful. For the new series, I'm sure you've already made note of the fact that they fit neatly into the gaps in your previous chart…

The character in blue is just two characters written too closely together. I've rewritten them in the image below. I was also trying to provide clarification about the series you marked as 3, which is just a normal ascender series, but which you've been conflating with another series: the vertical bar series, which is written with horizontal bars in place of dots (it's hard to add a mid-level dot to a vertical bar!). All the possible characters in both series are written out in the image below.



Please ignore the big white splotch. I sliced my thumb with a mandolin slicer last night and didn't want to rewrite (it hurts!).

Sorry for not helping out with this one more, even though I commented earlier. This is way too difficult for me to make anything out of.

Qwynegold wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2020 2:46 pm Sorry for not helping out with this one more, even though I commented earlier. This is way too difficult for me to make anything out of.

Maybe someday there will be the Risla Codex that scholars will baffle over while nobody is able to figure it out.

The vaguest of hints: if I were you, I'd start by looking for suffixes and thinking about common sequences of function words.

Hmm, maybe I'll try solving Quinterbeck's cypher first, because it seems easier. And then try this.

I'm curious if any more progress has been made on this or if I should start dropping more hints.

I haven't looked at it in a while, though I did discover that dots properly appear only on glyphs with extenders. The x-height glyphs with dots only appear like that alone, and in 4 specific words, so they must be abbreviated from forms with extenders.

I'm going to take a crack at this just to try. (Thanks to Risla for suggesting it on Discord as I hadn't previously seen it.)

Function words tend to be a single syllable, and we know dots are word boundaries, so let us look at single-syllable glyphs. The ten most common words in English text, in order, are the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, and I. We'll ignore be and have and just look at the other eight, since they don't inflect. With a small sample text like this we probably can't assume the order will hold--indeed we would expect I to be in probably the top six (there's a tie for each of fourth and fifth place).

In fact, let's just take a look at the top seven. Two of them appear to be variants of each other: a2b has no underline and a2v does. 'Capital gamma' isn't in the frequency list for some reason, even though it's quite common, so let's add it (the first character in the entire codex). One possibility is <in> and <an>--except <an> shouldn't appear often enough to be in the top ten. <The> and <that>?

I suspect that the 'accent mark' appearing above a character is perhaps just that. We know it has a variant in the form of an ascender, and all sufficiently long words do seem to have one...it's also very often on the first syllable, and most basic English words get initial stress.

Is there a null initial? If so we would expect it at the beginning of longer words but not in the middle.

Short vertical bar does not appear on its own, but it does appear in the center of longer words.

"6" often appears after another short word. That indicates to me it is likely one of the articles--either 'the' or 'a'. On the other hand--

"6", "6ב", and "ב" are all words. "In," "into", and "to", perhaps? There's also "cב", which...is probably not 'unto', this isn't the Bible; "onto"? Whatever "c" is, it also appears in "cʟ".

(Is "cʟ" 'today'? That would be sensible, but then we need "ב" to be something quite different.)

I've been meaning to get back to this!

dhok wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 9:57 am 'Capital gamma' isn't in the frequency list for some reason, even though it's quite common, so let's add it (the first character in the entire codex). One possibility is <in> and <an>--except <an> shouldn't appear often enough to be in the top ten. <The> and <that>?

'Capital gamma' isn't included, as it's distribution indicates it's some sort of paragraph-opening punctuation, along with the 'n' shape, it's tailed and doubled variants (period, comma, emphasis/question mark?), and the pair of chevrons < > (brackets/quotation marks?)

dhok wrote: ↑Thu Nov 12, 2020 9:57 am I suspect that the 'accent mark' appearing above a character is perhaps just that. We know it has a variant in the form of an ascender, and all sufficiently long words do seem to have one...it's also very often on the first syllable, and most basic English words get initial stress.

The accents (over -i and under -e) only appear on characters with extenders, with the notable exceptions a2-i, a2b-i, a2-e, d1b-i, which are all single-glyph words. I think that implies those four are abbreviated (with some unwritten extender) - and relative to other words they're pretty common.

The extender + dot combinations are basically given by this response from Risla, and my instinct is that they represent vowels on a consonant base.

Risla wrote: ↑Sun Sep 13, 2020 6:19 pm

I'll probably have another look on Saturday. Can't do it in the evenings - analysing the transcription I've done in excel has become too similar to my job...

Haha!!

edit: lol I missed the dot on the last word