Opinions on: line as a functional unit

[tavie]

I saw @tavie's presentation at the last Voynich day,but that was a lot of detail, and included speculation about the head lines...

To clarify, even though I cover top rows/head lines in both Voynich Day presentations, all the stats are separated out to avoid/minimize potential distortions from different effects. e.g. the stats around line start discrepancies are formed using a comparison between i) a "pure" basis that excludes line starts themselves, line ends, and top rows to generate predictions, and ii) the actual line start results which exclude likely paragraph starts.

Let me also remind people of the recent finding that the line-breaking algorithm used by scribes (not just on the VMS, but in any language and any epoch, even today) has the side effect of making the first word of each line longer than average, and the last few words shorter than average.  This phenomenon alone can have a significant effect on word frequencies at the start of the line...

I thought this was a theory proposed by Elmar Vogt and Ger Hungerink in 2012...but I didn't think it was proven as an explanation.   I find it interesting, and it makes sense that smaller words have a greater chance of sneaking it past the line end cut off; while larger words have a greater chance of missing out and therefore being line start.  But I had the impression only printed works were counted (is that wrong?), and it would be more interesting to see assessments of manuscripts, especially where longer words could in theory squeeze in at the end of the line by being abbreviated. It would also be interesting to separate out paragraph start words (we see some really long ones, as well as short ones like "pol") from the line start pack since they are almost certainly not being wrapped round.


Another point I'd make is that while the word wrap concept of longer words not fitting at line end is a potential explanation for the word length discrepancies, I don't see it as being a comprehensive potential explanation for the glyph discrepancies.  It might have an impact, but I don't see the evidence for it being the primary explanatory factor for why word types at line start are different.  We would expect the word types or glyph clusters "missing" at line end to be excessively popular at line start.  In many cases, we do not see this.  Something else is going on.