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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Despite the word "aiin" occurring 529 times in the text, it never occurs at the start of a line, similar with "ain".

I take that as evidence that aiin and ain are not complete words, but suffixes that got split off in the transcription file.

The Scribe has the habit of leaving extra space after r and s. On a quick check, many of the aiin indeed follow an r or s, and often that glyph is a word by itself.  These cases are likely intances of saiin and raiin that got incorrectly split.  But I see that there are other instances of aiin beyond those, so the truth may be more complicated...

The words "daiin" and "dain" occur about twice as often than expected at the start of lines.

  

There the situation may be the opposite: many of those daiin may be prefixes of longer words.

Curiously it seems that, of the ~70 instances of pairs daiin.X. at the start of a line, most of them are unique.  In the transcription I use, the only such pairs that occur more than once are 4 daiin.Shey, 3 daiin.Chey, 2 daiin.al, 2 daiin.Cheey, and 2 daiin.ol = 13 lines total.  I suppose that the excess of line-initial daiin is more than that, correct?.  

 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:

Why do you say so?  saiin and okol are common words, so those may be just cases where the Scribe thought it was OK to split a word across a plant.  And dy.dy or dydy is not uncommon either.

Maybe it's genuinely a stupid way to pad for length.

I meant, the Scribe would not know whether he would needed padding until he got near the end of the line.

Maybe it's shorthand to mark the start of sentences.

There are many possible explanations of that general nature.

For instance, some manuscripts of the time have some mark in the left margin of a line if a sentence/topic/paragraph starts anywhere within that line.

Maybe it's something arbitrarily decided on for reasons we'll never know.

When we finally get to read the text, the explanation of many of those baffling mysteries will be obvious.  Like the abbreviations and other weird quirks of any medieval manuscript...

All the best, --stolfi