[split] (lack of) word groups

[Hubert Dale]

I now have a sizable corpus of medieval texts so it could be interesting to test this. Do texts really need to contain many repeating "more than three words" sequences in order to be real?

A sizable corpus will make things interesting.
Obviously, an inflected language like Latin does not have the same positional constraints as English.
In English you must say "I drink coffee" (subject, verb, object), but in Latin "Claudius aquam bibet" "aquam Claudius bibet" etc are all possible, since suffixes specify the grammatical function of each word.

Also, one should consider how much languages change with genre/individual style and time-period. For instance, Chaucer could write:
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne

Finally, spelling variation will also have an impact. Unluckily, almost all transcribed texts somehow normalize spelling.

Hi Marco,

Exactly - English requires the kind of syntax Rugg mentions.  Latin doesn't.

It might also be worth pointing out that Latin metrical verse relies on this positional flexibility.  You could put the words from the following line in any order you like:

quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum

and there will still only be a single grammatically correct meaning.

I'd be curious as to whether a text such as De Balneis Puteolanis, which I think is written in elegiac couplets, exhibits the 'regularities in word order' which Rugg claims 'real' languages have.  My suspicion is that with a few exceptions, such as prepositions immediately preceding the noun they qualify, it may well not.

[I'm not arguing against Rugg's position that the VMs text isn't written in a natural language, and there is plenty of statistical analysis demonstrating why this cannot be so.  But explaining this in terms of 'regularities of word order,' as if English syntax was the be-all and end-all of such things, is misleading at best and incorrect at worst.  And that is unfortunate in an article written by a university lecturer complaining about bad science.]