Opinions on: line as a functional unit

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Going back to the topic of this thread:  I am still confused about what exactly LAAFU means.  I see that there has been a huge amount of discussion about it,and what I have read only left me more confused.

Is there a short summary of what is known somewhere?

Meanwhile, here are some suggestions that may help understanding those line-position anomalies:

1. Do not try to analyze the whole VMS, all together or even separately by section.  Imagine taking five texts on different topics, some in German and some in Swedish, and trying to uncover grammatical structures by running statistics on them.  Instead, focus on just one sizable homogeneous section -- Herbal-A, Herbal-B, Bio, or Stars -- and forget the rest.  Whatever insights are obtained from that section may not apply exactly to the other sections, but can guide their analysis.

2. Exclude the head lines of paragraphs, labels, and titles. Forget them. Whatever happens in them will be different and more complicated and than what happen in "body" lines. We must understand these first before we tackle the former.

3. Whenever possible, try to run your statistics on "control" manuscript texts with known languages and similar structure.  That presumably means working with Herbal-A or Herbal-B, and using as control some Medieval Latin herbal with roughly the same amount of text for each plant, with the line breaks in the manuscript  preserved in the transcription.   This last point is important because one possible contributing cause for the start-of-line anomalies is the bias towards longer words in that position caused by the normal line-breaking algorithm used by scribes.  I won't be surprised if the control text too shows (false) evidence of LAAFU.

4. Consider mapping VMS glyphs so as to reduce the effect of transcription errors and ambiguities.  Namely, map {a,o,y} to o, {r,s} to r, {k,t,p,f} to k.  Maybe even Ch to ee and Sh to re.  If the anomalies persist, they will be easier to understand. If the anomalies disappear, that by itself would be an important discovery that will need separate analysis.

5. For the same reason, try to avoid statistics that depend on word spaces.  Unless of course the analysis is about word frequencies, lengths, etc. 

Makes sense?

All the best, --stolfi