A mathematical approach to double words, conditional logic and the missing pages

[Vuk88]

In my transcription of the Starred Parags section ("Quire 20"), these are the string doublets and their frequencies, ignoring spaces and line breaks but not parag breaks: [...]

I re-counted the string doublets in the Starred Parags section after "correcting" m -> iin,  ir -> iin, hh -> he.  The only significant changes were aiinaiin rising from (4) to (29), and daiindaiin rising from (4) to (10).

The corrected file has N = 56817 EVA letters (including '?'). The string daiin occurs 415 times, and aiin occurs 1774 times (including 415 as part of daiin). By the same reasoning as before, the string doublet aiinaiin should occur ~55 times, so the actual count (29) is a bit too low. The doublet daiindaiin should occur only ~3 times, so the actual count (10) is somewhat notable.

All the best, --stolfi

I'm sure you noticed we got 10 occurrences of daiindaiin. Since basic probability says we should only see about 3, this clearly isn't just random noise.
Doesn't this suggest the text has internal rules forcing these strings together way more often than chance allows?

On the flip side, the exact opposite happens with aiinaiin, which actually makes perfect sense from a linguistic perspective.
When a highly frequent string like aiin actively avoids repeating (we see 29 but expect 55), it usually acts like a connector, article, or preposition. Think of the word 'the' in English: it's everywhere, but you never write 'the the' (unless it’s hidden inside adjacent words, which easily explains those 29 hits).

For me, this backs up the conditional variance I saw in the Python script regarding the active suppression or attraction caused by specific surrounding words.