how to recognize a null

Today, when the birds were whistling in our garden, the sun was playing hide and seek with the clouds that were driven by the engine of the wind… the question: “how can we recognize a null character” popped up again.

After doing some deciphering and reading, on my desk were the prints of all the occurrences & dependencies of all words and letters in them of the VMS that I’ve made before.

This time I wrote down in columns the high occurrences of letters left (L1) and right (R1) and then realized that

• when a letter on Apos of a word (initial word pos.) has almost the same characteristics as that same letter inside a word then, that letter is safe.
• All the letters that do not conform to that simple rule, are very candidates for a null, because they behave differently on different places.
• When a letter is unpredictable on different places and, yet at the same time has at least a mediocre occurrence rating, it has become a serious candidate for a null.
• If the candidate also shows up on almost any letter left and right, and it’s on any position in any word, then it’s a strong null candidate.

Be aware that a standard vowel can do such tricks in some languages as well.