(24-10-2016, 07:01 PM)Emma May Smith wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Marco, that's an interesting statistic regarding words beginning q. In the section I examined, Quire 20, q words stayed away from line beginnings!
Have we found another Currier A/B feature?! It seems we are measuring slightly different things, so I can't be sure.
You are right, Emma!
I think we do have another Currier A/B feature to explain: the Herbal section exhibits a LAAFU effect on q-words that cannot be observed in Quire 20 (f103-116).
In quire 20, I count 857 lines with q- words. 68 line-initial (7.9%), 106 line-final (12.4%).
This seems to indicate a preference for line endings (the opposite of what happens in the Herbal section).
My impression is that the apparent preference for line-ending is largely due to the fact that the initial words of lines are often occupied by Grove words. Since Quire 20 contains many short paragraphs, the impact of Grove words is significant.
If we don't consider the first lines of paragraphs in Quire 20, I count: 601 lines with q-words. 60 line-initial (10.0%), 72 line-final (12.0%).
If the occurrences were completely random, one would expect the percentage of line-initial and line-ending to both be close to the lines/words ratio (10.4%). This seems to be the case: I would say that in Quire 20 q-words are more or less independent on line position.
PS: I found a major error in the previous statistics, I am sorry. See update in the previous post.