(08-05-2025, 05:03 PM)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I still think some of the spaces (i.e., before 'q', after 'ain/aiin/etc.' -- EVA 'y' is trickier) are mechanically inserted, but it's unclear that adding them on top of the underlying word breaks works to sufficiently shorten the vords and reproduce other properties of the vord vocabulary.
My take on this issue is, that there is a correlation between the presence of spaces (word gaps) and word-final shapes. To a lesser extent also with word-initial shapes (primarily
q ).
As always with correlation, we cannot assume that one of the two causes the other.
They may also be two results of some common cause.
This still says nothing about whether these spaces are separators between words of a plain text.
(08-05-2025, 06:35 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If words starting "q" and/or ending "n"/"y" are discounted as mechanically inserted spaces rather than dice rolls, shouldn't they be discounted from the statistics?
Either way, I think if viewing the text like "2 5 7 3 4 8 2 3" this obviously could work. However I can't think of a way to hold it together once accounting for preferences of "words" just at a start-middle-end preference level.
Could it be that the word length is determined randomly for each word and the length is part of the key used to encode the word? Naive example would be a number of additional translations in Caesar cipher or what code table to use.
I guess in this case one would expect to see effect of padding characters at the end of paragraphs where the decided word length is longer than the available text. Not sure if VM has that property.
Curriers thoughts (in 1976) would agree with the appearance of padding and some sort of structure to each line (below).
The cipher side of things, I just don't know enough to comment on it properly sorry, hopefully others can provide some insight. It seems like an interesting idea to me though if it produces what Currier observed.
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The Line Is a Functional Entity.
In addition to my findings about languages and hands, there are two other points that I d like to touch on very briefly. Neither of these has, I think, been discussed by anyone else before. The first point is that the line is a functional entity in the manuscript on all those pages where the text is presented linearly. There are three things about the lines that make me believe the line itself is a functional unit. The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines are markedly different from the counts of the same char-acters internally. There are, for instance, some characters that may not occur initially in a line. There are others whose occurrence as the initial syllable of the first word of a line is about one hundredth of the expected. This by the way, is based on large samples (the biggest sample is 15,000 words ), so that I consider the sample to be big enough so that these statistics are significant.
The ends of the lines contain what seem to be, in many cases, meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don t occur anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the line to the margin. Although this isn t always true, it frequently hap-pens. There is, for instance, one symbol that, while it does occur elsewhere, occurs at the end of the last words of lines 85% of the time. One more fact: I have three computer runs of the herbal material and of the biological material. In all of that, which is almost 25,000 words, there is not one single case of a repeat going over the end of a line to the beginning of the next; not one. This is a large sample, too. These three findings have convinced me that the line is a functional entity, (what its function is, I don t know), and that the occurrence of certain symbols is governed by the position of a word in a line. For instance, there is a particular symbol which almost never occurs as the first letter of a word in a line except when it is followed by the letter that looks like o.