[split] What can the structural peculiarities of the VMS tell us about the nature of the underlying text

[tavie]

A concrete example of misdirection due to character statistics is the observation that, on the VMS, words that begin with qo are more common at line-start than elsewhere.  Now we know that one cause of that anomaly has nothing to do with those characters: it is just the bias towards longer words in that position that is created by the process of breaking text into right-justified lines -- and it so happens that qo-words are longer than average.  (This side effect of line breaking may not be enough to explain all the anomalies of qo-words; but it is still not known where there is anything beyond it.)

We do not know this.