Property:character variant
| Property | |
|---|---|
| Description: | Specifies the particular variant of a character used in epigraphically Raetic inscriptions, including its direction of writing. |
| Type: | Text |
Definition
| Char. | Variants
|
|---|---|
| add A |       
|
| add B |    
|
| add G |     
|
| add D |    
|
| add E |  
|
| add V |  
|
| add Z |      
|
| add H |   
|
| add Θ |     
|
| add I |  
|
| add K |  
|
| add L | 
|
| add M |   
|
| add N |  
|
| add Ξ |  
|
| add O |      
|
| add P |      
|
| add Ś |   
|
| add Q |   
|
| add R |   
|
| add S |   
|
| add T |     
|
| add U | 
|
| add Φ |  
|
| add Χ |  
|
| add F |  
|
See Property:character and Category:Character. Character variants are graphical variants of the same archigrapheme. The format used is As, Ad, E2s, E2d, where the upper-case letter stands for the archigrapheme, and the numeral indicates the variant as defined on the character's page. d stands for dextroverse, s for sinistroverse, the latter being the default case. In the case of mirror-symmetrical letters, the dextroverse and sinistroverse variants are identical, but still systematically distinguished; on inscription pages, the variant displayed is chosen in accordance with the writing direction of the inscription, e.g. 
Is in sinistroverse inscriptions, 
U2d in dextroverse inscriptions.
Only such variants of archigraphemes as are considered to pertain to the Raetic alphabets are systematically registered in TIR (in the Category:Character). This is feasible because the Raetic corpus is comparatively homogenic. Linguistically Raetic inscriptions are not known to be written in alphabet variants demonstrably different from the Raetic ones (the only exception so far being AV-1 written in a variant of the Camunic script). Epigraphically Raetic inscriptions do not appear to encode texts in foreign languages (not counting the imported onomastic material). Therefore, we can work with the hypothesis that every letter or letter variant, unless proved otherwise, is Raetic. A grey area is created by late Latinoid inscriptions, but even these are notably rare in the Raetic corpus (so far, only BZ-24 and possibly TV-1.1, as well as the inscriptoid SZ-69).
Many, indeed most variants are identical to counterparts from one or more neighbouring traditions. However, expressly non-Raetic variants displayed in the system, e.g. on Script or on the pages of inscriptions which are included in the corpus despite not being linguistically or epigraphically Raetic (such as the Venetic SL-2.3, or the arguably Latin SZ-68), are not registered on Category:Character, even though clicking on the character graphic will bring you to that page. A collection of additional characters belonging to other scripts/alphabets, marked with a prefixed "add", which are used in the TIR system can be found in the table on the left. To see which characters of which scripts and alphabets are in the system, use the statistics on Property:script and Property:alphabet (for "Category:File").
For more information and maps see Script and Non-script notational systems, as well as the individual character pages.
