Can LAAFU effects be modeled?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It may be about time for a reassessment of LAAFU. [...] For example, if my understanding is correct, the long 1st word and short last word of vms lines, according to Elmar Vogt can be also be found in 'Tomsawyer'.
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Indeed, the anomalous statistics at line ends seem to be just a natural consequence of how a scribe would choose line breaks.  

The effect may be more pronounced in the VMS because handwritten text is more "elastic": a scribe can stretch or shrink the glyphs themselves, not just the spaces, to make them fit.  Thus he may be able to fit one more short word in the current line in cases where a modern typographer, with "hard" typefaces, would have to break before it.

As for why Elmar (thanks for the link!) did not find anomalies in the second word of the line: I recall someone else observing that in English, but not in Voynichese, there is a tendency for long and short words to alternate.  This tendency would be an expected consequence of English grammar, which uses detached articles and prepositions (instead of inflections, e.g. as in Latin), and mandatory pronouns (instead of verb inflections, e.g. as in Romance). In that case, if the first word of a line is slightly longer than average, this phenomenon would tend to make the second word slightly shorter; and this may cancel any "second-word-longer" effect of the line-wrapping algorithm.

All the best, --jorge