The evolution of P/F vs T/K raises important questions

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the conclusion I recall from my own statistics was

• in their prev-char distributions, p/f resemble both k/t and ke/te;
  
• in their next-char distributions, on the other hand, they resemble ke/te much more than k/t
  

I get very different results, I may be wrong of course but I'm rather confident my software works as intended. p and f are quite distant from both ke and te. k and t are close together, and so are ke and te.

I dd not mean that in the next-char distributions they resemble ke/te.  I meant only that they resemble ke/te more than they resemble k/t.

That is why I once though that the hook could be significant.  That is, "straight p" = "t",  "hooked p" = "te" or something of the sort.  Then, if one ignores the hook (as is the case of all old transcriptions), the next-char distribution of p would be some mixture of those of t and te, and therefore different from both.

I don't find it as obvious that p/f are just fancy versions of something else.

The evidence for that is that they are quite common through the entire the head line of each parag, independently of its length, and rare elsewhere, in every section.  

One could wonder whether they are distinct letters that cannot be replaced by other letters without changing the meaning of the words.  But then we should conclude that every paragraph of every section begins with a special sentence that tends to use many exotic words with those exotic letters -- words that are rare elsewhere.  

Okay, we can imagine another manuscript where every every paragraph begins with a sentence transcribed from Arabic or Hebrew, that uses exotic phonemes like /ħ/ /ʕ/ /tˤ/ /sˤ/ /dˤ/ etc,  followed by a Latin text. 

But then it is strange to see this format also in Bio, which otherwise seems to be a continuous discursive text, where paragraphs are just like sentence breaks, only longer.

More importantly, this idea does not explain why we don't see that "exotic language" opening spill over into the second line of parags with very narrow margins.

This last argument seems to imply that the puffs are just a calligraphic variation of letter that have other forms in the body of parags, used to mark the head line of each parag (like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses a different font) and occasionally for some "important" words in the body of parags.

This  would be somewhat similar to capital letters in English: we capitalize every "non-trivial' word in chapter and article titles, and the first word of each sentence, but otherwise we capitalize only the first letter of proper names.

All the best, --stolfi