The first glyph of every line – a hint at a cipher?

[JoJo_Jost]

I am a bit puzzled by your figures for o_rate. In the manuscript the frequency of character o is greater than the frequency for character y. Yet the o_rate values are less than the y_ending values. It appears that o_rate is the character frequency. But qo_rate seems to be the frequency of words starting qo. To make everything consistent would it not help to have o_rate as the frequency of words with that character?

Also what are the columns t and p in your table?

Okay, when I classify a line by its first-token marker (say, p-start), I measure properties over all the other tokens in that line - i.e. token 2, 3, ... That's the "rest of the line" after the marker. All rates in the table refer to those rest-tokens.

o_rate = share of rest-tokens in the line that begin with o (excluding qo)
y_ending = share of rest-tokens that end with y
qo_rate = share of rest-tokens that begin with qo

The reason y_ending is higher than o_rate even though "o" is more common overall is simply that "y" is extremely concentrated at token-final position in the VMS (dy, ey, edy, y endings dominate), while o is spread across all positions within tokens.

The t and p columns are only statistic letters, not VMS Glyphs. t is the t-statistic from Welch's t-test (how strong the effect is), p is the p-value (how unlikely the result is by chance). Confusing because the first column also shows line-start markers that happen to be called t and p — sorry for the name collision.