11-02-2017, 11:30 AM
Hehehe Thomas, it's a good observation but bad conclusions 
I guess what you describe would be considered a "LAAFU" phenomenon, and those can be explained in many ways.
Autocopying: anyone arguing that the VM has been somehow procedurally generated could explain this by saying that a new line resets or changes the procedure. If the procedure never causes aiin at the start, then this is sufficient to explain the observation.
Natural language: this is trickier because language is not maths or logical procedure. So one could even need "psychological" arguments as an explanation. It seems unlikely that each line is a separate sentence, but what if, for example, phrases don't bridge lines? So the scribe would abbreviate or arrange his text to fit the last complete syntactic block on the current line. And some words can't start a phrase.
Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, we could say that "aiin" is a word like "and". In Latin for example, this can be expresses as "et" and "-que". Imagine the scribe uses "-que" at the end of a line. This prevents "et" from ever being used at the beginning.
A final option is something I've seen Emma propose, which involves the scribe adding a sound to the beginning of lines because he's only used to speaking this language, not writing it. When starting a new line, he would add a sound which is normally only added in fluent spoken language. She can explain it better
Just to say, there are many possible explanations.
I guess what you describe would be considered a "LAAFU" phenomenon, and those can be explained in many ways.
Autocopying: anyone arguing that the VM has been somehow procedurally generated could explain this by saying that a new line resets or changes the procedure. If the procedure never causes aiin at the start, then this is sufficient to explain the observation.
Natural language: this is trickier because language is not maths or logical procedure. So one could even need "psychological" arguments as an explanation. It seems unlikely that each line is a separate sentence, but what if, for example, phrases don't bridge lines? So the scribe would abbreviate or arrange his text to fit the last complete syntactic block on the current line. And some words can't start a phrase.
Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, we could say that "aiin" is a word like "and". In Latin for example, this can be expresses as "et" and "-que". Imagine the scribe uses "-que" at the end of a line. This prevents "et" from ever being used at the beginning.
A final option is something I've seen Emma propose, which involves the scribe adding a sound to the beginning of lines because he's only used to speaking this language, not writing it. When starting a new line, he would add a sound which is normally only added in fluent spoken language. She can explain it better
Just to say, there are many possible explanations.