Discussion of Variants
Orthographic Variants
The most common type of variation involves orthography. In general the most common
types of orthographic variation involve logographic spellings against syllabic spellings.
Also relatively common are interchanges of CVC signs for CV-VC signs, the elision of
phonetic complements, the writing of different signs with like value, and the use of
apocopated logograms in place of full composite logograms. Occasionally some nouns
lack determinative signs, which is regularly counted as a difference in orthography where
the style of the document is not affected.^332 In all there are 198 orthographic variants be-
tween all of the sources.
The tablets that contain the most amount of parallel material, A, AA and BB, also contain
the highest number of variations in orthography. Some texts, such as J and N, consis-
tently spell particular logograms with phonetic complements in contrast to other sources.
However, these texts do not share a particular orthographic affinity, as they can be shown
to vary with each other in other spelling practices. Rather, the rule seems to be that where
some sources agree in a particular aspect of their orthography they will disagree else-
where.
Most texts that preserve at least 50 SU in parallel display some level of orthographic dif-
ferentiation. Exceptions to this trend are A:Y, C:X, and Y:AA. In most of these cases
(^332) See note above, and the reference there.