Deconstructing the VMS : A positionless ledger (part 1)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It is simply a set of very simple rules describing how words could have been constructed and allowing existing words to be validated against those rules. The ledger defines those available construction rules.

I understand that.  My point is that the rules defined by your ledger are only a subset of the actual rules.  

Apparent actual rules include "there can be at most one gallows per word", "there can be at most three of {ch,sh,ee} per word", "there cannot be a d between two ch in the same word", "the in,iin,iiin can only occur at the end of a word", and many others.  

Does your ledger impose those restrictions?  If the Scribe used your ledger as a "spell checker" while writing, could he write the words "iindy", "chdch", "okydoky", "chochochychy"?

Anyway, when building the ledger you should exclude any word type that occurs only once in your sample.  Maybe exclude even any short word type that occurs only 2 or 3 times.  They are likely to be errors (by the Author, the Scribe, or the Transcriber).  

If you include those unique or almost-unique words, and they are errors, your ledger may end up allowing transitions that never occur in any correct word.  If you exclude them but they are correct, it probably will not make any difference, because the transitions in those words will probably occur in other words.

All the best, --stolfi