27-10-2026, 05:34 PM
One simple fact may explain most of this. Plain p and f are almost never followed by e: in the whole manuscript I count 5 cases of pe/fe against about 5,000 of ke/te. It holds in Herbal A, Herbal B, Bio and Stars, in head lines and elsewhere. And it isn’t a head-line effect: k/t on head lines take e just as often as k/t anywhere else.
@npcompl33t’s gradient is to a large extent the rise of e after gallows: k/t+e goes from about 16% of k/t in Herbal A to 57% in Pharma. A glyph that can’t take e will look more and more “behind” as e spreads, so P drifts away from K/T along the gradient without needing any archaic phase. It also rules out the simplest version of the “fancy k/t” idea: a random swap would leave about a third of puffs followed by e. What does seem to hold is that where k/t take e, p/f take ch: e plus ch comes to about the same share after both (52% vs 60%), which fits Mauro’s small ke–pch distance.
My own generator did the random swap, and that’s how I noticed: it wrote 24% pe/fe on head lines, where the real text has 0.4%. Fixing it now.
@npcompl33t’s gradient is to a large extent the rise of e after gallows: k/t+e goes from about 16% of k/t in Herbal A to 57% in Pharma. A glyph that can’t take e will look more and more “behind” as e spreads, so P drifts away from K/T along the gradient without needing any archaic phase. It also rules out the simplest version of the “fancy k/t” idea: a random swap would leave about a third of puffs followed by e. What does seem to hold is that where k/t take e, p/f take ch: e plus ch comes to about the same share after both (52% vs 60%), which fits Mauro’s small ke–pch distance.
My own generator did the random swap, and that’s how I noticed: it wrote 24% pe/fe on head lines, where the real text has 0.4%. Fixing it now.