Alin_J wrote:This can be true for any text where we don't know the language or anything about. However, statistics can still say a lot from starting with a basic assumption, and that can be that the meaning of a word is not context-dependent. To go from there and only consider those words which are written exactly the same way in the text could then be a reasonable starting point. If you deal with an unknown language you have to start from an assumption such as this, it is the only way to go. If it is a correct one, the results will probably reveal something. But of course, you can never be sure of anything already from the start regarding an unknown writing.
But that assumption has been at the basis of computational attacks for decades and has not yielded anything that illuminates the meaning (or lack of meaning) of the VMS text.
I am not against computational attacks. I think some of them have value but...
Isn't it time we questioned whether "similarity" in shape equal "sameness" in meaning?
ESPECIALLY considering that similarity in shape and sameness in meaning were NOT equivalent in medieval scripts?