You chose "m" as your example of the writing system itself expanding. That is exactly the case I have examined in detail.
"m" does the same thing as a scribe who may end a line either with "und" written out in full or with the abbreviation "&" — same value, free choice. If you count what stays constant, you get: the number of lines ending on that word does not change at all. Only the preference between the two spellings shifts. Right?
And that is exactly how "m" behaves. You cite it as a new glyph extending the system. But on folios without "m", nothing is missing. Two measurements, one pipeline: First, the broad class of line closings {n, r, l, m} stays at ~50% whether or not a folio uses "m" at all (permutation p=0.75) — the slot itself is conserved.
Second, where am-family closings (am, dam, okam) are absent, aiin-family closings are correspondingly more frequent — within Currier A alone p=0.006, within Currier B alone p=0.0002, so this is not just an A-versus-B difference. The gap does not spread across the rest of the alphabet, as copying from local templates would predict — if I understand it correctly. But no: it shows up in the exchange partner. And the swap is no one-letter edit — though "am" does look a little more like "aiin" than "&" looks like "und". Still: two differently shaped spellings serving the same closing function — a fixed slot, a wandering preference, measured on your own example.
"m" may simply be an abbreviation sign, like the closing flourishes of medieval scribes — Stolfi suggested exactly this relation: m as an abbreviation for iin-groups, particularly at line end, with dam/am as the counterparts of daiin/aiin.
(Along your chedy gradient: class share flat, ρ=−0.06; m-share within the class rising, ρ=+0.27, p=0.0005. Line-internal token endings show no such difference (control p=0.38) — the effect sits exactly at line-final position. Folios ≥8 lines; the picture is robust at page level ≥5 lines as well.)
On directional change: a cipher table that can be extended during use can produce exactly this signature. New entries can only be used after they have been added — can't they? So new families logically appear only later, seemingly "out of nowhere". And if old entries are kept — so as not to endanger decipherability — early families persist. That is your asymmetry, word for word: your own temporal-arrow argument ("variants can only appear after their source exists") applies to a growing table just as much as to copying. Direction alone cannot distinguish between these two cases! Sorry.
And part of the direction need not be evolution at all, but content. Any manuscript whose subject matter is arranged systematically produces a vocabulary gradient by itself: terminology tied to one part of the subject declines while terminology tied to the next rises, with a mixed transition zone in between. A table of contents arranged along a scale looks, from the outside, exactly like "evolution" — except that it isn't.
(What distinguishes the two models in principle: under a growing table, the structural rules must hold for old and new families alike. And they do: adjacent gallows remain practically nonexistent in all four quartiles of your gradient, and "qo" stays ~99% token-initial throughout. Self-citation does not by itself explain why the strongest combinatorial constraints remain invariant while the vocabulary distribution drifts.)
On your test: normalizing the Breslau spellings works for exactly one reason — we know German (the two of us especially
). We recognize "vnder", "under", "unnd", "un" as the same word because we know the word. For an unsolved cipher, precisely this recognition is missing. The failure to recover plaintext is therefore predicted either way — whether the text is self-citation or an unsolved homophonic cipher. A test that comes out the same under both hypotheses decides nothing.
What is possible without the key is distributional normalization — finding glyphs that behave as one class. The m/aiin relation above is exactly that: a recovered distributional equivalence class within the stable core, with p-values. Your model has no reason to expect such conservation classes. Mine predicts that more of them should exist. The m/aiin relationship is one such case.
"m" does the same thing as a scribe who may end a line either with "und" written out in full or with the abbreviation "&" — same value, free choice. If you count what stays constant, you get: the number of lines ending on that word does not change at all. Only the preference between the two spellings shifts. Right?
And that is exactly how "m" behaves. You cite it as a new glyph extending the system. But on folios without "m", nothing is missing. Two measurements, one pipeline: First, the broad class of line closings {n, r, l, m} stays at ~50% whether or not a folio uses "m" at all (permutation p=0.75) — the slot itself is conserved.
Second, where am-family closings (am, dam, okam) are absent, aiin-family closings are correspondingly more frequent — within Currier A alone p=0.006, within Currier B alone p=0.0002, so this is not just an A-versus-B difference. The gap does not spread across the rest of the alphabet, as copying from local templates would predict — if I understand it correctly. But no: it shows up in the exchange partner. And the swap is no one-letter edit — though "am" does look a little more like "aiin" than "&" looks like "und". Still: two differently shaped spellings serving the same closing function — a fixed slot, a wandering preference, measured on your own example.
"m" may simply be an abbreviation sign, like the closing flourishes of medieval scribes — Stolfi suggested exactly this relation: m as an abbreviation for iin-groups, particularly at line end, with dam/am as the counterparts of daiin/aiin.
(Along your chedy gradient: class share flat, ρ=−0.06; m-share within the class rising, ρ=+0.27, p=0.0005. Line-internal token endings show no such difference (control p=0.38) — the effect sits exactly at line-final position. Folios ≥8 lines; the picture is robust at page level ≥5 lines as well.)
On directional change: a cipher table that can be extended during use can produce exactly this signature. New entries can only be used after they have been added — can't they? So new families logically appear only later, seemingly "out of nowhere". And if old entries are kept — so as not to endanger decipherability — early families persist. That is your asymmetry, word for word: your own temporal-arrow argument ("variants can only appear after their source exists") applies to a growing table just as much as to copying. Direction alone cannot distinguish between these two cases! Sorry.
And part of the direction need not be evolution at all, but content. Any manuscript whose subject matter is arranged systematically produces a vocabulary gradient by itself: terminology tied to one part of the subject declines while terminology tied to the next rises, with a mixed transition zone in between. A table of contents arranged along a scale looks, from the outside, exactly like "evolution" — except that it isn't.
(What distinguishes the two models in principle: under a growing table, the structural rules must hold for old and new families alike. And they do: adjacent gallows remain practically nonexistent in all four quartiles of your gradient, and "qo" stays ~99% token-initial throughout. Self-citation does not by itself explain why the strongest combinatorial constraints remain invariant while the vocabulary distribution drifts.)
On your test: normalizing the Breslau spellings works for exactly one reason — we know German (the two of us especially
). We recognize "vnder", "under", "unnd", "un" as the same word because we know the word. For an unsolved cipher, precisely this recognition is missing. The failure to recover plaintext is therefore predicted either way — whether the text is self-citation or an unsolved homophonic cipher. A test that comes out the same under both hypotheses decides nothing.What is possible without the key is distributional normalization — finding glyphs that behave as one class. The m/aiin relation above is exactly that: a recovered distributional equivalence class within the stable core, with p-values. Your model has no reason to expect such conservation classes. Mine predicts that more of them should exist. The m/aiin relationship is one such case.