VMs: Line and paragraph as structural unit (Noise or data ?)

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

5/21/03 2:11:29 PM, "Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Which brings us back to 
>the phenomenon of
>the line and paragraph as a structural unit. It was Currier who noticed 
>this, but neither he nor
>anyone since has explained why this should be so.

I cannot explain why this should be so, but I can explain how
this could be so (I actually might have some years ago. The
disheartening thing about the VMs is that, whatever new ideas
I have come up with lately, I have found already in the archives
long ago, often suggested by myself: I had just forgotten).

The paragraph as a structural unit. It it reasonable to think
that a paragraph contains at least one whole sentence, and
therefore ends in a whole sentence. Many languages make use of
sentence-final particles, others put their verbs at the end.
In the first group Chinese, especially Classical Chinese; 
Japanese, Korean. In the second group Japanese, Korean, Burmese,
Hindi, Malayalam, and many more I do not know about.

As for paragraph beginnings, I guess that the structural alluded
to is the regular presence of a gallows. The simplest explanation
provided here was that it is ornamental, as the first letter of
chapters in medieval manuscripts is usually ornamental.

The line as a structural unit. This again is in the archives.
We may imagine that the scribe is "thinking aloud" (perhaps
even saying aloud) what he is writing. Arriving at the end of
a line (a physical line, on paper), there is a tendency to
pause (try it). If the language used has external sandhi, this
pause prevents the end of the word at the end of the line from
merging with the next word. The result is that the letters at
the ends of lines (and the beginnings of lines) have a different
frequency distribution than elsewhere in the lines. 
Many languages have external sandhi to varying degrees of
complexity. Sanskrit is one, at the complex end of the 
spectrum. Korean is another, a bit less complex. Many Chinese
dialects have it, about as complex as Korean. French has
it too, Modern French not much, but French of the 1800's and
more so French of the 16th century, in the form of "liaisons".


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