18-05-2026, 11:03 AM
I agree with much of what you and Torsten Timm have written.
However the flow of the writing suggests that the writer did not pause after each word to think of what ought to come next. So I am still inclined to believe that the method is more simple, and doesn't involve looking back at previous words.
I like to suppose that at each sitting the writer approached the task with a fresh mindset, and that this mindset persisted for the remainder of the sitting. So, unintentionally, he might that day have written more iin than in, had a liking for a particular suffix, wrote more gallow words than usual, used a lot more s words or a words or r words, more qo words, used more of a particular word. Unintentionally, the writing was different at each sitting.
At least in the big paragraph text of quires 13 and 20 I have found that the distribution of these and many such parameters is not uniform. Often many standard deviations away from what would be expected if the words, prefixes, suffices, characters etc. were distributed randomly. I have tried to say something of this in a number of posts. See
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Also I do believe that the writing was affected by psychological factors. Just as in the gibberish writing trials where participants fell to using "word repetition or the reuse of prefixes and suffixes" so it is so in the VMS. Also they had "a tendency to write a series of long words, realize they had not written any short words recently, and then self-correct by switching to short words". This is also a feature in the VMS. See
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And for much the same reason I believe this can explain the fact that number of occurrences where gallows words come immediately after another gallow word is higher than expected ( at least in quires 13, 20 ).
The writer of the VMS was being psychologically lead. It is much easier on the mind not to have to think of new words but to reuse with modification something that you have written lately. It was all done 'on the fly', just as in the trials.
I believe it is also possible sometimes, by looking at a range of parameters, to identify where pages on opposite sides of a sheet were written at the same sitting. See
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As for the construction of gallows words I have tried to show that the majority of them could be constructed from a list of prefixes of varying frequency together from a list of suffices and that the choice of suffix is independent of the prefix. At each sitting the writer might have had a preference for some of other prefix or suffix, giving a semblance of local modification.
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However the flow of the writing suggests that the writer did not pause after each word to think of what ought to come next. So I am still inclined to believe that the method is more simple, and doesn't involve looking back at previous words.
I like to suppose that at each sitting the writer approached the task with a fresh mindset, and that this mindset persisted for the remainder of the sitting. So, unintentionally, he might that day have written more iin than in, had a liking for a particular suffix, wrote more gallow words than usual, used a lot more s words or a words or r words, more qo words, used more of a particular word. Unintentionally, the writing was different at each sitting.
At least in the big paragraph text of quires 13 and 20 I have found that the distribution of these and many such parameters is not uniform. Often many standard deviations away from what would be expected if the words, prefixes, suffices, characters etc. were distributed randomly. I have tried to say something of this in a number of posts. See
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Also I do believe that the writing was affected by psychological factors. Just as in the gibberish writing trials where participants fell to using "word repetition or the reuse of prefixes and suffixes" so it is so in the VMS. Also they had "a tendency to write a series of long words, realize they had not written any short words recently, and then self-correct by switching to short words". This is also a feature in the VMS. See
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And for much the same reason I believe this can explain the fact that number of occurrences where gallows words come immediately after another gallow word is higher than expected ( at least in quires 13, 20 ).
The writer of the VMS was being psychologically lead. It is much easier on the mind not to have to think of new words but to reuse with modification something that you have written lately. It was all done 'on the fly', just as in the trials.
I believe it is also possible sometimes, by looking at a range of parameters, to identify where pages on opposite sides of a sheet were written at the same sitting. See
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
As for the construction of gallows words I have tried to show that the majority of them could be constructed from a list of prefixes of varying frequency together from a list of suffices and that the choice of suffix is independent of the prefix. At each sitting the writer might have had a preference for some of other prefix or suffix, giving a semblance of local modification.
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