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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

But also here is a curiosity about words starting with s.  The parts of the words that follow seem themselves to be genuine words that appear frequently. This seems to suggest that initial s is something of a nonsense character, that the writer will often start a line by putting down s and then continuing with another word.

Many languages have phonetic tone, meaning that the pitch or pitch pattern changes the meaning of words.  Not just Chinese and other East Asian languages, but Swedish and other scattered languages of Africa and the Americas are like that.  (In Romance languages, a rising tone at the end of a sentence generally changes it from affirmative to interrogative; and a higher pitch is used to emphasize certain words.) 

There are several ways to denote tones in writing, like italics, question marks, diacritics, pitch brackets ˹˺ etc.  One common way is to use diacritics on vowels to specify one of a few pitch patterns, like in the pinyin rendering of Mandarin: e.g. zhǔ for the third "dipping" tone.  An alternative is to use digit suffixes or superscripts, like zhu3 or zhu³.

But another way is to encode pitch levels rather than pitch profiles.  Using digits 1,2,3 for low, medium, and high pitch, the Mandarin third tone would be written as zh21u3 meaning that the syllable is to be pronounced by varying the pitch from middle to low to high.  This notation is more cumbersome, but it can handle different dialects or languages with different tone profiles, like Cantonese (6 tones) or Vietnamese (8 tones), with a single notation.  It may also be chosen when one is not quite sure about the set of tone profiles of the language.  

However the digits may be inserted anywhere in the syllable, so that same word could be written 213zhu, zh2u13, zhu213 etc. And when the next syllable starts with the same pitch that the previous one ended with, one could omit the starting pitch of the second one: so instead of m1a2 m2a2 m21a3 one could write just m1a2 ma ma13.

(And then there may be regular changes in the pitch pattern of a syllable depending on that of the previous syllable, if there is no pause between them.  But the picture is complicated enough as it is.)

All this to say that, if the language is tonal, and some letters like a, o, y denote pitch levels, then the Scribe may omit redundant pitch codes in the middle of a line, as above, but write them out at the start of a line, to make reading easier.

And this is only to point out that there may be many explanations for the "LAAFU" effects that do not imply a semantic or cryptological function for line breaks, and are compatible with these being chosen by the Scribe with the trivial line-breaking algorithm,

All the best, --stolfi