04-04-2018, 06:26 AM
The problem I see is the following:
there are two ways to define 'valid' and they will lead to different conclusions.
If this were a normal book in a normal language, there would be plenty of valid words in this language that happen not to appear in the book. There are also plenty of valid words that appear exactly once, and looking at pairs of words (e.g. singular and plural versions of a noun) there will be cases where only one or the other appears, even if both are valid.
In such a case it make sense to limit the test only to words that have a reasonably high frequency in this particular book.
The Voynich language (if it is one) only exists in this one book. A very practical way of defining 'valid' words is if they occur in this book. If the text is not language, this is also the correct way, because there is nothing beside the text in this book. In that case, from the examples quoted by JKP, the thesis would be false.
If it is a meaningful language, then there could be other words that we don't know about, and one could make the statistical analysis that was implied above.
there are two ways to define 'valid' and they will lead to different conclusions.
If this were a normal book in a normal language, there would be plenty of valid words in this language that happen not to appear in the book. There are also plenty of valid words that appear exactly once, and looking at pairs of words (e.g. singular and plural versions of a noun) there will be cases where only one or the other appears, even if both are valid.
In such a case it make sense to limit the test only to words that have a reasonably high frequency in this particular book.
The Voynich language (if it is one) only exists in this one book. A very practical way of defining 'valid' words is if they occur in this book. If the text is not language, this is also the correct way, because there is nothing beside the text in this book. In that case, from the examples quoted by JKP, the thesis would be false.
If it is a meaningful language, then there could be other words that we don't know about, and one could make the statistical analysis that was implied above.