Palaeography
I have a question for all of you:
Is your writing internally consistent? By which I mean, does the shape of each letter you write vary, or is it always pretty much the same?
You see, the reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking a lot about palaeography at the moment, especially since there seems to have been rather widespread literacy among the population(s) writing in Cypro-Minoan. That means we see lots of individual hands, rather than multiple examples of the same hand... but occasionally (possibly once, actually) we have a hand reappearing. If you think of the Linear B Mycenaean inscriptions, on the other hand, in those you get multiple examples of a single hand, which allowes further analysis for a script related to Cypro-Minoan (though admittedly one that seems to have some kind of scribal tradition).
The identification of a hand (i.e. a single person writing) often seems to be based on the idea that an individual person will always write a particular form of a particular sign. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but taken at base value this doesn't allow for variation within one hand. Other theories seem to be built on this assumption as well - for example in an undeciphered script, one might assert that if two forms that might otherwise be thought to be alternate forms of the same sign are found in a single inscription, this means they must be different signs after all, because internal consistency would be expected from a single writer.
Now, when I look at my own writing, I notice that it is not at all internally consistent. I use two different types of 's' (in both lower and upper case), for example. I use two different types of capital 'E', and of lower case 'l', and of upper case 'I'... The list goes on and on, and I find that the majority of my graphic repertory consists of signs that alternate between one form and another. Sometimes the alternations seem random, and sometimes I can begin to detect a pattern (e.g. a particular form of a letter being more common before another particular letter, or at the start of a sentence, or at the end of a word).
So... I wanted to know whether this is a common feature or not, really! The fact that I can spot this kind of variation in my own writing rather throws some traditional theories about palaeography (about which I'm currently reading) into doubt - but only if it's typologically common and not just me :)
Opinions and ideas welcome and appreciated!
Is your writing internally consistent? By which I mean, does the shape of each letter you write vary, or is it always pretty much the same?
You see, the reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking a lot about palaeography at the moment, especially since there seems to have been rather widespread literacy among the population(s) writing in Cypro-Minoan. That means we see lots of individual hands, rather than multiple examples of the same hand... but occasionally (possibly once, actually) we have a hand reappearing. If you think of the Linear B Mycenaean inscriptions, on the other hand, in those you get multiple examples of a single hand, which allowes further analysis for a script related to Cypro-Minoan (though admittedly one that seems to have some kind of scribal tradition).
The identification of a hand (i.e. a single person writing) often seems to be based on the idea that an individual person will always write a particular form of a particular sign. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying, but taken at base value this doesn't allow for variation within one hand. Other theories seem to be built on this assumption as well - for example in an undeciphered script, one might assert that if two forms that might otherwise be thought to be alternate forms of the same sign are found in a single inscription, this means they must be different signs after all, because internal consistency would be expected from a single writer.
Now, when I look at my own writing, I notice that it is not at all internally consistent. I use two different types of 's' (in both lower and upper case), for example. I use two different types of capital 'E', and of lower case 'l', and of upper case 'I'... The list goes on and on, and I find that the majority of my graphic repertory consists of signs that alternate between one form and another. Sometimes the alternations seem random, and sometimes I can begin to detect a pattern (e.g. a particular form of a letter being more common before another particular letter, or at the start of a sentence, or at the end of a word).
So... I wanted to know whether this is a common feature or not, really! The fact that I can spot this kind of variation in my own writing rather throws some traditional theories about palaeography (about which I'm currently reading) into doubt - but only if it's typologically common and not just me :)
Opinions and ideas welcome and appreciated!