[Article] Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script

[DonaldFisk]

1) the statement:

So when the pair say that Hebrew was the highest scoring match for the manuscript without rating the likelihood, this is a bit of a meaningless boast. “Someone has to have the highest score,” says Argamon.

is doing insufficient justice to the close match given in Figure 4. At first I also considered that it could just be the end of the probability curve, but it is justified to call it an outlier and it is not understood why this happens. This has to be investigated further.

I think it is just the end of a probability curve.   Below 0.05 on the x-axis, the probability of finding a language drops below 1 (on the y-axis).   This means that in practice you'll find zero or one value at each point there, which is exactly what we have: zero at 0.01, 0.03 and 0.04 and one at 0.02.

We also don't know how the histogram would look if early 15th century languages were used instead, as they should have been.  For all we know, Middle High German or Middle Georgian might have matched much better than their modern counterparts and taken the top spot instead, with Mediaeval Hebrew being a much poorer match.