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Review 002 - CURRIER, Prescott H. (1976): Some Important New Statistical Findings

Last updated Dec. 19th, 2024.

Reference for the text reviewed here can be found in my bibliography page.

Please refer to the home page for a set of definitions that might be relevant for this working note.

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The below is a brief note on CURRIER (1976) section titled “The Line Is a Functional Entity” where he states: “These three findings have convinced me that the line is a functional entity, (what its function is, I don’t know), and that the occurrence of certain symbols is governed by the position of a ‘token’ in a line”; the three statements he refers to are summarized below:

  1. “The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines are markedly different from the counts of the same characters internally”.

    This is universally accepted and confirmed, including in my Note 010.

  2. “The ends of the lines contain what seem to be, in many cases, meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don’t occur anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the line to the margin”.

    I am not aware of anybody picking up on this. To me it seems the length of tokens at the end of the line is not different than in other parts of the line (see Note 011). Maybe Currier meant some random symbols are added at the end of words; this is to be checked.

  3. “In [the herbal material and of the biological material] … there is not one single case of a repeat going over the end of a line to beginning of the next”.

    On this last point, I could find only the below exceptions in the majority version of the Slot transcription{1}; whether they are problematic, I leave it for another time.

* Herbal A
  * 'daJn' on f35v.16-17, f87r.13-14, f90r2.5-6
* Biological
  * 'dar' f84r.22-23
  * 'qol' on f78v.22-23
  * 'qokaJn' on f82r.3-4 
  * 'qokEdy' on f84r.39-40 
* 'qokaJn' on f86v6.42-43 (Text page in the Rosetta quire)

Notes

{1} See class CurrierRepeatTest.

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