Opinions on: line as a functional unit

[oshfdk]

Besides these options, it's quite hard to imagine any explanation which fits what we see in the manuscript. If text flowed from one line to the next, without lines acting as natural sentence enders/break points, it's really quite hard to imagine how that would work. Would words that end sentences act as a "\n" newline character, but only sometimes? That really doesn't make sense. 

Of course there could be another explanation we haven't thought of, but most likely, given the abundance of evidence we have that the text is meaningful, it's probably 3a or 3b if I had to guess. My money being on 3b for a variety of reasons.

There are many other possible explanations:
- the sequences at the ends of the lines are abbreviations, to avoid splitting words (or maybe the manuscript is enciphered and the nature of the cipher doesn't allow splitting words at all)
- the words are actually split between lines, and special cipher symbols are used to indicate that the continuation of the encoding is on the next line, and other symbols at the beginning of a line indicate a continuation from the previous line
- lines often contain lists of examples and whenever there is little space left and it's not very important to continue expanding the list, the line is terminated with something like "etc.", "and so on". In which case the next line would often start with something like "on the other hand", "however", etc.
- there are several possible ways to encode a sequence (one-to-many cipher) and naturally when the space is constrained (near the end of a line or otherwise), shorter sequences are preferred, while at the beginning of a line the longer sequences are more frequent.

I'm not sure any of these explanations is very good, but over the years there have been proposed dozens of different plausible explanations for LAAFU. The question as I see it is not "how is it possible at all", but "which of many explanations is the right one".