Glyph group numbering

31. October 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Item A, Item B, Item C, Item D, Item E, Item F, Item G, Item H, New Features

In Horley’s seminal work (Horley, 2021) he introduces a way of referring unambiguously to locations on the tablets. He assigns each group of ligatured glyphs a number, ascending in the order of the writing direction. Recognizing a ligatured group should be fairly straightforward, even for the uninitiated. There are some tricky points however.

For one thing, some glyphs are still recognized as single glyphs, even though they consist of two isolated parts. For instance, glyph 017 consists of two isolated parts placed vertically, 053 consists of three lines, and 025 consists of two curved boxes which are sometimes drawn touching, but not always.

For another, Horley is very careful to distinguish instances of touching glyphs from those that are not, and numbers the groups accordingly. This happens even in cases where the touching or non-touching seems likely to be coincidental. This can also mean that he assigns separate numbers to glyphs that are drawn as linked by Barthel and/or Fischer, but where he determines that the linking is not present. Anyhow the numbers shown refer to the numbers in Horley’s work, regardless of the way they are shown by Barthel and Fischer. For this reason too, there will be skipped numbers, whenever Horley recognizes some glyph that the others did not see. And in a few cases Barthel, or more likely Fischer, sees a glyph that Horley does not recognize. Such glyph groups go un-numbered.

At the same time I am also bringing the numbering of tablet sides in line with Horley’s work. Horley provides evidence for renaming the sides of some of the tablet after providing arguments for determining which side is front (“recto”) and which should be the back (“verso”), Among the tablets that have so far been updated are the following:

  • A: Tahua is changed from a/b to r/v
  • B: Aruku-Kurenga is changed from r/v to a/b
  • C: Mamari is changed from a/b to r/v
  • D: Échancrée; as mentioned previously, the lines of side B are renumbered in opposite order, i.e., 1–6 becomes 6–1
  • Tablets E–H have also received glyph group numbers, but the side names stay the same

Tiny Corpus Update

07. December 2024 · Write a comment · Categories: Corrections, Item G

Some time ago I had noticed an error on Tablet G (“Small Santiago”), Verso, Line 1, where code “043t” was pointing to the wrong glyph. While this error was clearly mine, the seed for this error goes all the way back to Barthel himself. Barthel coded the preceding glyph combination as “33c.10f.76” when in fact it should have been “33c.10f.1.76″. At some point this got corrected to: “033c.010f.001” losing the “076” in the process. At any rate the “076” has now been restored and the “043t” code moved to the correct place.

Tablet G and test of future search function

07. July 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Barthel, Experiments, Fischer, Item G, Tablets

Pages for G have been added.
G with lines and codes – Barthel
G with lines and codes – Fischer

I have now added some experiments that I made with a new version of a complete corpus. This is going to be a big file. Including the tablets completed so far (A – G, J, K and L) it is already 45+ MB. Using this file I can now search for glyphs and display them in context. Some random samples are shown on the pages linked to below.
Search function test pages

Tablet G and Item L

17. June 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Barthel, Item G, Item L

For G:

For L:

In this case the line is curved. The scanned version shows as is. For the svg the line has been straightened. This was achieved by isolating the glyphs and rotating them individually, and then placing them so as to preserve the distance between glyphs.