14-09-2019, 02:22 PM
(14-09-2019, 01:01 PM)Anton wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Another point of interest with h2 is that whether it could provide hints as to inflections. My idea is that different degrees of inflection would influence the word h2 (of course also h0 and h1) values. For example, in Russian you have six cases for nouns - nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative and prepositional. And, generally, word ending would be different. In Latin, if I'm not mistaken, you have only four. In English you have none, or even if they are distinguished, the word endings do not change, that's the point. Same thing for verbs. So it's of interest to see how different inflection behaviour of languages is (or is not) reflected in word entropy.
Latin has five commonly used cases, six if you count the vocative case, which is rarely needed in written documents. Sorry to be pedantic. Out of curiosity, if I'm addressing someone directly in Russian, what case do I use for their name?
The difference between analytical and agglutinative languages comes to mind here. The difference, as I understand it, is that agglutinative languages modify words by adding to or changing their pronunciation, whilst analytical languages prefer to leave words unchanged, and modify them by changing their placement among other words in the sentence. It's really a gamut, with modern English being one of the most analytical Indo-European languages, and Latin and Russian much more agglutinative. (Someone with a background in linguistics please feel free to correct me — I'm only an amateur linguist.)
Pertinent to the VMS, word order tends to be much less flexible in analytical languages. It seems intuitive to me that Shannon entropy and agglutinative-ness of a language would correlate significantly, and that Koen's test data in this thread supports this. If so, then it seems to me that we might be able to predict how agglutinative the Voynichese language is, and compare it to known languages with a similar pattern of inflection.
@Koen G, This thread is making me wish I'd paid more attention in statistics class. Nice work.