Analysis of patterns at the very start and end of lines, per line type

[oaken]

One could test that theory by separating all lines into subsets based on their first glyph, computing the word frequency distribution of each subset (excluding the first word of each line) and comparing those distributions.

I did a fast check. The cosine similarity plot suggests that the first character of a line doesn’t create a separate "language" within the manuscript. It may nudge the line in a certain direction, but overall the vocabulary quickly falls back into the same general pattern as the rest of the text.

Interesting. It's probably a completely unfounded thought, and one which would render the majority of the text meaningless and its production very strange. But what if the line start letter marks the only enciphered word in the line and the rest is nulls? Historically nulls are I think used at least in the same century as the vms production. It couldn't be that simple, right?

Edit: the other thing they reminded me of a little was the check numbers used by the Sopherim to ensure the hebrew bible was transcribed correctly.