About the construction of lines in the MS

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I am sorry to say this, but I believe that this line of investigation is and will be a big waste of time.  I hope you can see it even if you don't believe in the Chinese Origin theory and the SPS=SBJ claim.

The line-break anomalies (statistical anomalies at the start and end of lines) are real, sure.

But a first problem is that it seems hard to even describe what the anomalies really are.  There is a bunch of differences in character statistics that are basically corollaries of the different word frequencies at those positions.  Because the frequency of a character or digraph in a certain context is determined by the frequencies, in that context, of the words that have that character or digraph.  And the differences of word distributions at different positions seem to be rather complicated, with no simple rule.

Moreover, there are so many potential "boring" causes that could explain those anomalies. Including the length bias of basic TLA, the use of abbreviations, and the stretching and shrinking that suppresses word spaces or creates bogus ones.  

The Scribe may have consciously or unconsciously favored line breaks in certain word contexts, like before words with gallows.  Or the Author's draft may have had line breaks at semantically significant places, like sentence boundaries or where we today would put a comma; and the Scribe then may have tended to accept those breaks if they happened to fall near the end of his line. 

And then there are many errors introduced at all stages -- spelling errors by the Author, reading and writing errors by the Scribe, errors added by BEEPs, and transcriber errors.  Including missing, bogus, and ambiguous word spaces.

And the main problem is that we do not know what are all those "boring" causes and how much effect they have on the line-break anomalies.

So, even if the LAAFU thesis is correct, I see no hope of disentangling its "signal" from all that "noise" of those "boring" causes.  

And those "boring" causes make the anomalies so complicated that I see no hope of getting any insight into anything by tabulating and plotting a bunch of statistics.  

It is like trying to understand the ecology of a forest by tabulating the heights, tail lengths, wing spans, and the colors of eyes and noses of every animal that goes through a checkpoint.  Those numbers are "meaningful" in principle, but they would mash together ants and antelopes, beavers and butterflies, cranes and crocodiles, zebras and zombies...  One could spend a lifetime staring at those numbers and analyzing them in a million sophisticated ways, but would never get any useful conclusion out of them.

All the best, --stolfi