22-04-2018, 03:39 AM
Greetings all, my name is Don and I am new here.
I am a retired medical scientist with a background in chemistry and interest in things statistical, though not in the context of language.
There is little I can bring to the table other than an analytical mind.
Anyway I have spent a few weeks reading through most of the threads on this site and perhaps can bring a fresh perspective.
I was impressed with the Torsten auotocopy suggestion which has the potential to account for many of the observed features of the VMS including the low entropy by a plausible method available in the 15th C.
To the point though, as somebody else observed, this does not exclude the possibility of actual real content buried in the manuscript. As an analogy I am thinking of the WW2 radio practice of sending coded message phrases buried among a whole bunch of similar nonsense phrases.
As an aside, there was a famous instance in the battle of Leyte Gulf where the message sent was "Where is 5th Fleet?"
and instead the message received by the admiral was "Where is 5th Fleet? The world wonders!"
The accidentally added nonsense phrase amounted to gross insubordination in the context!
I do not know the technical term for this procedure but it strikes me that something similar could easily be going on in the VMS.
It seems also that there are many instances where sections seem to have been inserted in the text as a second pass.
We could ring the changes on the corrollaries of this, such as what upper limit on real content is placed by the entropy stats? Is the message spread throughout the text in small pieces or in less frequent larger chunks? If so such chunks may still be amenable to a statistical approach and in any case Torsten's software could be used to model some scenarios.
Apologies if all this has been suggested before, I am sure it has but maybe not recently in the context given.
I am only an egg compared to most of you.
I am a retired medical scientist with a background in chemistry and interest in things statistical, though not in the context of language.
There is little I can bring to the table other than an analytical mind.
Anyway I have spent a few weeks reading through most of the threads on this site and perhaps can bring a fresh perspective.
I was impressed with the Torsten auotocopy suggestion which has the potential to account for many of the observed features of the VMS including the low entropy by a plausible method available in the 15th C.
To the point though, as somebody else observed, this does not exclude the possibility of actual real content buried in the manuscript. As an analogy I am thinking of the WW2 radio practice of sending coded message phrases buried among a whole bunch of similar nonsense phrases.
As an aside, there was a famous instance in the battle of Leyte Gulf where the message sent was "Where is 5th Fleet?"
and instead the message received by the admiral was "Where is 5th Fleet? The world wonders!"
The accidentally added nonsense phrase amounted to gross insubordination in the context!
I do not know the technical term for this procedure but it strikes me that something similar could easily be going on in the VMS.
It seems also that there are many instances where sections seem to have been inserted in the text as a second pass.
We could ring the changes on the corrollaries of this, such as what upper limit on real content is placed by the entropy stats? Is the message spread throughout the text in small pieces or in less frequent larger chunks? If so such chunks may still be amenable to a statistical approach and in any case Torsten's software could be used to model some scenarios.
Apologies if all this has been suggested before, I am sure it has but maybe not recently in the context given.
I am only an egg compared to most of you.