Comment by registeredcorn
10 months ago
Could you dumb this down a bit (a lot) for dimmer readers, like myself? The way I am understanding the problem you are getting at is something like:
> The way person_1 in 1850 wrote a lowercase letter "l" will look consistently like a lowercase letter "l" throughout a document.
> The way person_2 in 1550 wrote a lowercase letter "l" may look more like an uppercase "K" in some parts, and more of a lowercase "l" in others, and the number "0" in other areas, depending on the context of the sentence within that document.
I don't get why you would need to see the entire document in order to gauge some of the details of those things. Does it have something to do with how language has changed over the centuries, or is it something more obvious that we can relate to fairly easily today? From my naive position, I feel like if I see a bunch of letters in modern English (assuming they are legible) I know what they are and what they mean, even if I just see them as individual characters. My assumption is that you are saying that there is something deeper in terms of linguistic context / linguistic evolution that I'm not aware of. What is that..."X factor"?
I will say, if nothing else, I can understand certain physical considerations. For example:
A person who is right-handed, and is writing on the right edge of a page may start to slant, because of the physical issue of the paper being high, and the hand losing its grip. By comparison, someone who is left-handed might have very smudged letters because their hand is naturally going to press against fresh ink, or alternatively, have very "light" because they are hovering their hand over the paper while the ink dries.
In those sorts of physical considerations, I can understand why it would matter to be able to see the entire page, because the manner in which they write could change depending on where they were in the page...but wouldn't the individual characters still look approximately the same? That's the bit I'm not understanding.
The lower case "e" in gothic cursive often looks like a lower case "r". If you see one of these: ſ maybe you think "ah, I know that one, that's an S!" and yes, it is, but some scribes when writing a capital H makes something that looks a LOT like it. You need context to disambiguate. Think of it as a cryptogram: if you see a certain squiggle in a context where it's clearly an "r", you can assume that the other squiggles that look like that are "r"s too. Familiarity with a scribe's hand is often necessary to disambiguate squiggles, especially in words such as proper names, where linguistic context doesn't help you a lot. And it's often the proper names which are the most interesting part of a document.
But yes, writers can change style too. Mercifully, just like we sometimes use all caps for surnames, so some writers would use antika-style handwriting (i.e. what we use today) for proper names in a document which is otherwise all gothic-style handwriting. But this certainly doesn't happen consistently enough that you can rely on it, and some writers have so messy handwriting that even then, you need context to know what they're doing.