About word length distribution

[Bluetoes101]

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.