I wouldn't be surprised if Currier was referring to the phenomenon I described. One could almost think that there is some kind of obfuscation ( for whatever ).
What I can say after my tests is that very short words probably are not that often, not even slightly modified, at the beginning of a line. This would have been noticeable in the results, at least in the folios I tested. For example, in folio 115v, words of length one to three letters occur zero times at the beginning of the line but nine times at the end of the line.
As said, a value below 3 is rare and with similarly short word pairs there are only a few possibilities of substitution.
edit: in the entire VMS, there are much more often short words at the end of a line as at the beginning ( Word length one to two letters, result 153 / 537 ).
Here are the word lists (one to two letters). I have removed all lines in the VMS corpus with only one word (for Levenshtein test). So the result is only approximate.
What I can say after my tests is that very short words probably are not that often, not even slightly modified, at the beginning of a line. This would have been noticeable in the results, at least in the folios I tested. For example, in folio 115v, words of length one to three letters occur zero times at the beginning of the line but nine times at the end of the line.
As said, a value below 3 is rare and with similarly short word pairs there are only a few possibilities of substitution.
edit: in the entire VMS, there are much more often short words at the end of a line as at the beginning ( Word length one to two letters, result 153 / 537 ).
Here are the word lists (one to two letters). I have removed all lines in the VMS corpus with only one word (for Levenshtein test). So the result is only approximate.
