25-04-2026, 02:18 PM
(This post was last modified: 25-04-2026, 02:21 PM by Jorge_Stolfi.)
Quimqu, this little experiment only reinforced my conviction that this line of enquiry is a big waste of time.
The question is not whether there are many significant anomalies in the text round line breaks. That is a fact beyond dispute. The question is what causes those anomalies -- and how could we determine those causes.
The LAAFU theory is actual two theories. One theory says that the line break anomalies (LBAs) originate in the plaintext itself, where line breaks would be semantically significant. Which would be the case, for example, if the plaintext was poetry or hymns, whith each line being a verse. Or if each parag was a formula with certain fixed fields, synchronized with lines:
Flight: MCXXV Airline: Baghdad Magic Carpets
Departure: 20/jan/1340 2:30 pm From: PRI Prague International
Arrival: 21/jan/1340 07:02 To: SAM Samarkand North
Baggage: 1 trunk Pets: No Special meals: No
Passenger: Nicole Oresme Class: Plebeian
I think we can dismiss this version of LAAFU because the width of lines on many pages is highly variable and determined by accidents that the Author could not have foreseen, such as illustrations and vellum defects (like the "blotter" area of on f112r and f112v). And yet the text is justified normally within those irregular margins. Which makes it almost certain that the line breaks were chosen by the Scribe, based mainly on space conditions -- with little or no influence from the contents, or from the line breaks in the Author's draft. That is, the Scribe just applied some SLA to the unbroken stream of tokens of each parag.
The seconf version of LAAFU says that the LBAs arise because the encryption method was affected by the line breaks. Like, it could be an algorithm that took each line, whole and separately, as input, and acted on each character in a different way depending on the distance from the ends of the line.
This version is harder to dismiss. In theory, a sufficiently complicated encryption method could explain all LBAs, including those we haven't detected yet.
One problem, however is that (for the reasons above) this theory implies that the encryption was done by the Scribe himself, as he was transcribing the author's text. I find it hard to imagine how that arrangement could have worked, exactly, considering that the encryption would depend on distance from the end of the line.
Again, the alternative to both versions of the LAAFU theory is the BAAA theory ("Break Anomalies Are Accidental") which says that the LBAs are accidental and meaningless side effects of the line-breaking algorithm used by the scribe. We have already identified two mechanisms that generate LBAs, namely the length bias of basic TLA (interacting with word-to-word correlations), and the apparent option of abbreviating iin by m. Surely there may be others. Will they be enough to explain all the LBAs?
But, either way, I don't see any hope of finding the answers to those questions by computing statistics and staring at the results. The effect of the q-o pairs on predictability, described in my previous post, is an example of how complicated the "accidental" causes can be.
So I don't know what to do about this question.
All the best, --stolfi
The question is not whether there are many significant anomalies in the text round line breaks. That is a fact beyond dispute. The question is what causes those anomalies -- and how could we determine those causes.
The LAAFU theory is actual two theories. One theory says that the line break anomalies (LBAs) originate in the plaintext itself, where line breaks would be semantically significant. Which would be the case, for example, if the plaintext was poetry or hymns, whith each line being a verse. Or if each parag was a formula with certain fixed fields, synchronized with lines:
Flight: MCXXV Airline: Baghdad Magic Carpets
Departure: 20/jan/1340 2:30 pm From: PRI Prague International
Arrival: 21/jan/1340 07:02 To: SAM Samarkand North
Baggage: 1 trunk Pets: No Special meals: No
Passenger: Nicole Oresme Class: Plebeian
I think we can dismiss this version of LAAFU because the width of lines on many pages is highly variable and determined by accidents that the Author could not have foreseen, such as illustrations and vellum defects (like the "blotter" area of on f112r and f112v). And yet the text is justified normally within those irregular margins. Which makes it almost certain that the line breaks were chosen by the Scribe, based mainly on space conditions -- with little or no influence from the contents, or from the line breaks in the Author's draft. That is, the Scribe just applied some SLA to the unbroken stream of tokens of each parag.
The seconf version of LAAFU says that the LBAs arise because the encryption method was affected by the line breaks. Like, it could be an algorithm that took each line, whole and separately, as input, and acted on each character in a different way depending on the distance from the ends of the line.
This version is harder to dismiss. In theory, a sufficiently complicated encryption method could explain all LBAs, including those we haven't detected yet.
One problem, however is that (for the reasons above) this theory implies that the encryption was done by the Scribe himself, as he was transcribing the author's text. I find it hard to imagine how that arrangement could have worked, exactly, considering that the encryption would depend on distance from the end of the line.
Again, the alternative to both versions of the LAAFU theory is the BAAA theory ("Break Anomalies Are Accidental") which says that the LBAs are accidental and meaningless side effects of the line-breaking algorithm used by the scribe. We have already identified two mechanisms that generate LBAs, namely the length bias of basic TLA (interacting with word-to-word correlations), and the apparent option of abbreviating iin by m. Surely there may be others. Will they be enough to explain all the LBAs?
But, either way, I don't see any hope of finding the answers to those questions by computing statistics and staring at the results. The effect of the q-o pairs on predictability, described in my previous post, is an example of how complicated the "accidental" causes can be.
So I don't know what to do about this question.
All the best, --stolfi