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

[dashstofsk]

The point remains that a generator capable of producing a hoax in 1430 that could replicate the fascinating interplay between structure and variability in the VMS is anachronistic. 

I think I understand you now. You are of the opinion that any hoax would have needed some sort of generating algorithm? And that you do not believe that any such generator would have been likely at that time? And created all the oddities and irregularities in the manuscript? In particular it would have needed to recreate your p-effect or the statistically irregular distribution of gallows words in quire 13 that I showed earlier?

Neither do I believe that the writer used any generating algorithm, or stopped after every word to consult some code table or otherwise to decide the next word. He seems to have had the ability just to write, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, a whole page in one uninterrupted sitting. The fluency of the writing shows this.

The scenario I like to imagine is that the writer invented an alphabet in order to create the hoax manuscript. Used the alphabet primarily for this manuscript but otherwise did not use it much for any other purpose, so his own use of it was a bit fitful. He would have written one or two pages and then finished work for the day. Perhaps on the next day, or perhaps sometime during the next week, or perhaps the following year if he was starting on a new section, he sat down again to write. But at this new sitting he approached the task with a fresh mindset so that the language and writing was a bit different to what he wrote previously. Whether intentionally or not he might have been lead to use more gallows words, or liked to use more daiin words, or use more of a certain prefix or suffix, or liked to amuse himself by forming rare and longer words. Even if the writer wanted to write consistently he would not have succeeded. Humans are not good at mimicking randomness. Psychological tricks have a habit of misleading you into falling for pattern repeats. This is what Gaskell and Bowern observed in their experiment.

The writer had a way of generating text to give it a semblance of genuineness. But he was not an automaton, did not blindly follow some set algorithm. He gave himself a free hand to add variability and to write in a personal style. Wrote what he liked. Was untroubled by any of the psychological tricks. No-one was going to be able to understand the manuscript anyway.

So on some pages there would appear a greater frequency of gallows words. On other pages a lesser frequency. One consequence of this is that it gives your p-effect. Once again, there is nothing special about the EVA-p character.

But it is not just the frequency of gallows words that is irregular and statistically significant. It is true for many other parameters. My code can tabulate and do simulations to show it. The top words, top prefixes, top suffices, top character pairs, frequencies of gallow words, frequencies of words that appear once in the quire, frequencies of long words, frequencies of words of two characters, frequencies of words that contain characters EVA-s, d, e, a, n, r. Far too many of these are statistically anomalous. There appears to be no uniform core parameter that would be expected of a meaningful narrative.