Mathematical Attempt to Remove Impact of Alphabet Differences

[MichelleL11]

Thanks so much for all of your thoughts.  BTW, Marco -- I didn't expect experiments, just thoughts!

In my view, this whole thing can be summarized as follows:

1) In general, these matching attempts suffer from major issues that make it difficult, if not impossible, to interpret the validity of the results (even for the people doing the experiments!). 

2) This is seen, at least for the Jaskiewicz paper internally and through a comparison of Darrin's work and Jaskiewicz work to each other, through the lack of an underlying similarity of the results (at least as how language similarities are determined with known languages).  It is difficult to imagine the match seen has true "meaning" given the range of qualities of the "matches," particularly for the Jaskiewicz study.

I guess this observation could be expanded to Darrin's results -- how traditionally "similar" are the identified Caucasian languages to each other?  I will try to find that out for the board. 

3) Some of these issues might be able to be addressed through use of multiple transliteration alphabets (as Darrin has done) or through ordering of the frequency of the individual letters of the alphabet prior to comparison (as Jaskiewicz has done).  But neither are perfect solutions and it is unlikely (but, admittedly, unknown until it is tried) that applying both solutions to both approaches could bring more concordance (no, Marco -- this isn't a hint for you to do the work, Darrin and Jaskiewicz would be the most appropriate and it's okay in my view for this to be left where it is, especially given (5) below).

4) Part of the reason for the conclusion in part 3) is that there are still multiple issues about the input files and/or methods still unsolved (such as the handling of diacritics and other language aspects not taken into account that could be expected to alter the results.  These details are generally related to the use and comparison of multiple alphabets with the transliteration alphabet(s) of the VM). Basically, the methods used thus far for comparison may be too simple to provide a meaningful language match.

5) But even if all the issues were solved, it remains most likely that no meaningful match would be found because other data (done using methods that provide interpretable results) strongly suggests the VM is not a 1:1 substitution or other phonetically based substitution.  I'm going to be gathering and figuring out what that data is - any suggested directions are much appreciated! 

Thanks for all your input and putting up with my learning process on this.