Words around text intrusions/image breaks and towards the start/end of lines

[zachary.kaelan]

Thus, whenever possible, compute and study the frequency of words rather than glyphs.

I didn't mention it, but I did, actually. Specifically, I looked at the rates of words in specific positions compared to words anywhere not at the start or end of the line. 

Despite the word "aiin" occurring 529 times in the text, it never occurs at the start of a line, similar with "ain". The words "daiin" and "dain" occur about twice as often than expected at the start of lines. The word "shedy" is 19% as common as expected at the start of lines, and 91% of occurrences of the word "dshedy" are at the start of lines. Other words that are abnormally common at the starts of lines include dshey, yshey, dchor, ychor, dchey, ychey, dcheey, ycheey, dshedy, yshedy, dshor, dchol, and ycheol. 

Many lines end in am, and m seems less common at other places along the line.

It does also occur a solid 18 times before text intrusions, most commonly as the trigraphs "dam" or "dom".

The trivial line-breaking algorithm is: if there is enough space on the current line for the next word, write it and continue.  If not, break the line there and start a new line at the left rail.

People don't seem to realize, but this banal algorithm results in the first word of each line being longer than average, with the last 1-3 words of each line being shorter than average.

The discrepancy in word length can probably at least mostly be attributed to that, though on some folios like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there's definitely a bunch of what objectively looks like filler:

These anomalies could be due to the letter e being used mostly in medium-length words like  cheedy and used less in both longer and shorter words.

More investigation is required.

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It makes no sense to have padding at the start of a line.  It may be simply that many long words start with y or d.

Of course it makes no sense, but it's what they appeared to have been doing. Maybe they're nulls meant to make things more difficult. Maybe it's genuinely a stupid way to pad for length. Maybe they play some role in the cipher. Maybe it's shorthand to mark the start of sentences. Maybe it's something arbitrarily decided on for reasons we'll never know.