Re: Fw: Character n anomaly

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Nick Pelling quoting Currier:] 
    > 
    >   The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines
    >   are markedly different from the counts of the same characters
    >   internally. There are, for instance, some characters that may
    >   not occur initially in a line. There are others whose occurrence
    >   as the initial syllable of the first "word" of a line is about one
    >   hundredth of the expected. </snip>

In fact there are some characters that cannot occur at the 
beginning of a *word*.  If line breaks occur only between words,
Currier observation would be expected.

    >   The ends of the lines contain what seems to be, in many cases,
    >   meaningless symbols: little groups of letters which don't occur
    >   anywhere else, and just look as if they were added to fill out the
    >   line to the margin. There is, for instance, one symbol that, while
    >   it does occur elsewhere, occurs at the end of the last "words"
    >   of lines 85% of the time.
    
That must be <m> and its variants. Note that <m> is a pen flourish
suggestive of abbreviation in handwritten text. (Nowadays we use "."
for that purpose.) Indeed <m> seems to occur in cramped contexts where
an abbreviation could be expected.

    >   One more fact: I have three computer
    >   runs of the herbal material and of the biological material. In all
    >   of that, which is almost 25,000 "words," there is *not one single
    >   case* of a repeat going over the end of a line to the beginning of
    >   the next; not one.

    > [Nick Pelling:] Proper statistical examination should help
    > resolve this to everyone's satisfaction. How different is the
    > average gap between spaces from the average gap between gallows
    > characters?
    
I can tell you that between two spaces you will find either no
gallows (~50% of the time) or exactly one gallows (~50%).  Between two gallows
you will find at least one space, and in fact k spaces with probability
~1/2**k, for k > 0.   

(The few exceptions --- words with two or more gallows --- seem to be
cases of omitted spaces.)

All the best,

--stolfi