Structural patterns in the VMS & Evaluating the Tironian shorthand hypothesis

[CorwinFr]

Real herbal roots: 55%. Random words of same lengths: 25% mean. p = 0.004.

This is not a valid method: the null hypothesis is not that the first words of paragraphs are random. It is well known that the first lines of paragraphs are special, and the first words of lines are special, see PAAFU, LAAFU studies. By "special" I mean statistically different, the first character mostly but not only, also much frequent gallows in the words of the first line and especially on the first word: they are certainly not "random" words.

You're right, and that's exactly the flaw. I should have known about PAAFU/LAAFU before building a null test on the assumption that paragraph-initial words are exchangeable with random words. They're not, the gallows enrichment in first position is well documented.

The corrected test confirms what you'd expect: when controlling for block-initial character distribution, the herbal-pharma substring signal vanishes completely (p = 0.944). Retracted on GitHub with full analysis.