About the construction of lines in the MS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

And, to complete the exercise, here is a plot comparing TLA and SLA on the same token stream:

   

As in the "A" test of the previous post, the input token stream has 50% "long" tokens with 7 letters and 50% "short" ones with two leters, and each word is independently chosen.  The SLA is the same as TLA, except that a word that ends in "iin" will gets that ending replaced by "m" if that change delays a line break that would otherwise occur just before that word.  (The abbreaviation also happens at random in the middle of the lines, with a small probability).

As the plots show, the effect of this sophistication at line-start is barely detectable, and at line end it is effectively zero.  The problem is that, in this simulation, only 15% of the words end in "iin", the abbreviation works in only a fraction of the cases, and when it does it shortens the word only by 2 out of 7 letters.  Thus the frequency of line-final m in the SLA-formatted text is very small. 

IIRC, the frequency of line-final m is much higher in the VMS, and is one of the main anomalies ascribed to LAAFU.  Maybe it can be reproduced by this SLA if we used the actual stream of Voynichese tokens, with line breaks removed and all "m" replaced by "iin".

BTW, the scripts and data files used to make the plots are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The main script is  do_note_005.sh.

All the best, --stolfi