About the generation of similar words

[Jorge_Stolfi]

What I have noticed is that in and around plant stems are shorter words.

The 1-3 words before plant stems should be shorter than average, for the same reason that the 1-3 words at the end of each line should be.  Namely, the Scribe would be more likely to break the line just before a long word than before a short one.  

Conversely, the first word after a plant stem or line break should be longer than average. 

And, IIUC, several people have noticed both anomalies around line breaks long ago.  But, until recently, they did not realize that they were a simple consequence of the trivial line-breaking algorithm.

There may be other factors at play, like a possible tendency of the Scribe to break lines before certain key words, or at the places where the draft itself had line breaks (even if the Scribe was supposed to ignore them).  But the natural bias above seems to account for a good part of the observed anomalies.

All the best, --stolfi