[Article] The Singulion and the Sequence: A Methodological Review of Layfield and Davis 2026

[Torsten]

Is it true that 4 plants appearing on a single bifolio share the same vocabulary that they don't share with other plants from another bifolios?

This would be really hard to explain if the text was a natural language.
Are there any more articles about BAAFU?

Rafael, yes, that is essentially correct. Pages on the same bifolium share vocabulary characteristics that they do not share with pages on other bifolia — even adjacent ones in the same quire.

A clear example is the distribution of EVA m in Quires 1–3. On some bifolia 36 and 17/24, EVA-m is used frequently across all four pages. On adjacent bifolia 2/7 and 20/21, m does not appear at all (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The all-or-nothing pattern follows bifolium boundaries, not page sequence — neighbouring leaves in the bound quire have completely different m usage.

This observation goes back to Timm (2014), where I documented that rare words propagate across consecutive sheets rather than across recto and verso of the same leaf, with a ratio of 37:5 for words occurring seven or eight times (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 17). You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. coined the term BAAFU (Bifolio As A Functional Unit) in December 2022 in response to a forum discussion of this evidence.