Evidence for 2 rules linking words in Herbal A->B

[dashstofsk]

In the case of a forgery, it doesn’t matter so much what words are written.

No, it does matter.

In order to create the deception the writer understood that he had to give the manuscript a semblance of genuineness, give it some definite structure. Otherwise unstructured random and nonsense writing would have been quickly dismissed as a fraud. The fact that the manuscript has existed to this day and that we are debating it is proof that the writer succeeded.

But there are clues to the deception. We today can see something of the way it was done. The structure of gallow words is one of the clues. The language clusters are also a clue. They suggest that the writer did not have a firm 'method', but had a free hand to vary and was happy to allow the writing to change and develop.