About the generation of similar words

[quimqu]

Is the core generally shorter than the peripheral members?

So don't focus only on patterns and statistics that are common to all words.  Pay attention to individual words (or word clusters) that deviate from the general patterns... 

Hi Jorge,

As for whether the core tends to be shorter than the variants, the results do not indicate this. On average, the length of the core and the members of the burst is very similar, and the core is even slightly longer in some cases. What does appear clear is that many variants are exactly the same length as the core. This suggests that a good part of the variants are formed by small internal changes within the word, rather than by adding material to it.

It also seems useful to look at specific families of words that deviate from the general behavior. When doing this, it becomes clear that not all families function in the same way. Some remain almost always the same length and seem to rely mainly on internal substitutions, while in other families the variants tend to be longer. This suggests that the mechanism of variation is not uniform across the entire vocabulary of the manuscript.

Note again that I am using CUVA transliteration whre some EVA gliphs are grouped as a single gliph.