[Blog Post] Peter Bakker on the VMS

[Torsten]

It is not logical that someone creating a look-alike of a real text by taking previous words and slightly modifying them, would repeat the same word three or four times, if such a thing would be illogical for real texts.

First René Zandbergen argued "The method is basically arbitrary", now he is arguing that it would be illogical to repeat the same word multiple times. This two arguments not only contradict each other they are also not based on something I have said. I have always argued against the idea that the method is arbitrary or random and I never argued that it would be illogical to repeat the same word multiple times.

Secondly, it is hard to tell what an author in the 15th century found logical or illogical. There is for sure no given ruleset for writing a look-alike text. The only goal is to write something that on first view looks like text. Therefore everybody doing such a task would come up with his own ideas and would develop his own style. As Peter Bakker points out a typical feature we can expect for a pseudo text is, that the text provides inconsistent features: "that certain letters are much more frequent in some parts of the text, and even to such an extent that it is suspicious" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Another feature described by D'Imperio is repetition: "The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out  the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase" (D'Imperio 1978 p. 31)

It should also be taken into account that it is a very monotonous task to write a whole book by copying and modifying previously written words. Therefore we can't expect that the scribe had used the same level of carefulness for every page of the whole book.

The auto-copying theory is just compatible. It is not a good explanation.

That a theory is compatible with the facts is enough. Personal opinions like to me "it doesn't look like a good explanation" shouldn't be used in a constructive discussion.

Whenever someone writes something about our paper from 2019 René Zandbergen jumps in with and says something similar. He finds it important to make clear that in his eyes the paper doesn't have anything important to say:
- "While my opinion of this work is along the same lines as Emma's, I do see that there are very interesting statistics that still lack an explanation." You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "If all of the VMs text is somehow the result of a random process, in the style of Rugg or Timm, then we would see something different." You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "My question remains what the autocopist theory really explains. It focusses on one aspect (similar words appearing near each other) but does not explain some more conspicuous ones, even if in the most recent paper it argues that it does." You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "The Rugg method has this as a very clear 'advantage' over the method of Timm. Every single page in the MS has lots of words that are not a small edit distance away from previous words, so it can't be done for the Timm method." You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "In Timm's system the word structure is hardly addressed" You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- "I don't think that the Timm (and Schinner) approach really explains the repetitions of high-frequency words. The method is basically arbitrary, ... This is not really a good explanation." You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

All these posts have in common that René Zandbergen doesn't go into the details. He only uses pseudo arguments like the method is "basically arbitrary" (the contrary is the case). He also didn't care if his arguments contradict each other ("small edit distances" vs. "basically arbitrary") or if I had already provided some counter arguments. He simple repeats his false claims and hopes that in the long run it is easier to repeat and to vary his statements than to demonstrate his statements wrong (Isn't it funny that René Zandbergen uses the self-citation method intuitively himself while arguing against the idea that someone could have used the self-citation method to generate large amounts of text?). There is even a whole thread in which René Zandbergen used incorrect statistical methods to "correct" the observation that high frequency words occur together with similar ones on the same pages (see the thread You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

In his first response to our paper Zandbergen wrote "More importantly, this topic is so much more worthy of discussion than the recent paper about proto-Romance" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But he never came back to his first statement and he never tried to discuss the subject in a constructive way. Only René Zandbergen knows why he is so heavily biased against our paper whereas he normally tries to present a balanced view. Whatever the reason is, it is worth to notice that he is unable to provide any real argument for his position. Only therefore it becomes necessary to him to refer to the opinions of others and to provide unclear and even incorrect statements as arguments.