Language A vs B crib?

[Emma May Smith]

Hi Emma,

Thanks for this comment pointing out the complexity evidenced by the word spelling differences due to their line position. It's one of the features that must be a big clue as to how the system works. (That, and the repeated glyph sequences.) However, in the case of "am" and "8am" the influence of line position may be minimal, as these words do not tend to appear at the beginnings or ends of lines, right?

[aiin] doesn't appear at all at the beginning of lines, and absence is as good as presence!

Run some counts for word pairs with similar beginning characters. The version beginning [a] should be more heavily occurring in B language pages, and seldom or never at the beginning of lines. The version beginning [da] should be more evenly spread across A and B languages, and have a stronger occurrence at the beginning of lines. I believe that some process is adding [d] to the beginning of words beginning [a] when they occur at the start of lines.

Of course, that doesn't immediately explain when words beginning [da] do occur elsewhere in the text, but: 1) words beginning [da] at the start of B language lines are a noticeable phenomenon, and 2) a similar change may be conditioned by other factors in the text. Marco Ponzi once worked me up some statistics which show a weak, but plausible, connection between certain characters at the end of words and other characters at the beginning.