Correlation between line-initial letter and words on that line?

[nickpelling]

Has anyone looked for statistical evidence of a correlation between the first word of a line of text and words on that same line?

Plenty of people (myself included in 2006) have wondered whether the first letter on a line of Voynichese might somehow affect or control the words on that line. (For example, I wondered whether it might be a transposition cipher working with one of the gallows.)

Has anyone tried looking for this kind of thing?

[bi3mw]

Has anyone looked for statistical evidence of a correlation between the first word of a line of text and words on that same line?

I have experimentally measured the Levenshtein distance between the first and last word of each line. My hope was to see a pattern, but it didn't turn out that way.

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[RobGea]

No, not personally and as LAAFU is a thing i thought there would more stuff related to this type of question but i cannot find much with a websearch.
Hopefully others may know of some research.

As a note, i just now did a rough check on letter frequencies for all lines that start with a specific char and got a mundane result
but thinking about it perhaps the result is not so mundane after all...Meh, still need to check some real texts for comparison.
-edit- Nope, my bad nothing to see here.

[obelus]

nickpelling --

Attached are visualizations of the line-initial-character-specific word frequencies in an FSG text sample (as specified below).

The rows are indexed by line-initial character, together with the total number of pooled words for each;  the columns are indexed by words that appear in the initial-character-specific pools.  Both axes are ordered by frequency in the complete text sample, with greatest frequency at the upper left, and the 40 most-frequent words shown.

This grayscale indicates absolute frequency of a word within each initial-character word pool:

   

Here, the previous values are normalized by the frequency of each word in the complete text sample
(frequency in initial-letter pool) ÷ (global frequency)
on a logarithmically compressed color scale;  unity is beige, and saturated hues are deviant:

   

It appears as if the popular line-initial letters (O, G, 8, etc), with their concomitant large pools of words, independently approach the global word-frequency distribution -- suggestive of a null result for initial-letter significance. At least some of the deviant distributions for rare initial letters must be statistical fluctuations.

TEXT SAMPLE:  FSG_ivtff_1c.txt extracted with ivtt options -c5 -p2 -s1 -l4 -w1 -h2 -u1 +@P
("normal" running paragraph text, with preferred readings of alternatives, and uncertain spaces and questionable glyphs removed)

EDIT:  EVA formatting removed from secondary axes

[Davidsch]

Has anyone looked for statistical evidence of a correlation between the first word of a line of text and words on that same line?

Plenty of people (myself included in 2006) have wondered whether the first letter on a line of Voynichese might somehow affect or control the words on that line. (For example, I wondered whether it might be a transposition cipher working with one of the gallows.)

Has anyone tried looking for this kind of thing?

To be short: yes, I did, but the words that make it difficult for me here are  "affect or control other words". 


Without going into depth there, there is no correlation that I've found between the first letter and the line following that,
except that the gallows signal a paragraph section.