Old Polish (geoffreycaveney's theory)

[geoffreycaveney]

Well, the original objection from Marco still stands, namely that the selection of the VCI is based on just one of a great number of different possible verbose ciphers.
Let's say that this number is 100. Koen and Marco perhaps tried about that number of different combinations in the 'entropy hunting 3' work, but there are many more that they did not try. So let's stay conservative and use 100.
The next step is mapping the VCI to plain text characters. For an alphabet size of (say) 25, it is well known that there are 25! (factorial) different ways of doing that, which is of the order 10**25. However, that is clearly pessimistic. Let's again be conservative and assume that we know which are the 5 vowels and the 20 consonants. We can swap the vowels freely (5!) and for each consonant we would have 3 options. This gives 5! times 3**20 possibilities, which is close to one million, and there is no particular reason to pick one or the other except for a 'feeling' or 'intuition'. 
The probability of having it right is already 1 in 10**8.
Next, the words need to be adjusted to make them 'real old Polish words'. Again, being conservative, let's say that only every second word has two different options. Now there are 38 words, so that gives 2**19 different versions, which is half a million.
In the end, the possibility of having the right Polish text is conservatively estimated as 1 in 5 * 10**13.
How should this number be interpreted?
It means that you could have, with equal probability, followed 5 * 10**13 different procedures to arrive at an old Polish plain text without ever knowing, along the way, if it was the right one.

Of course there are many different possible decipherings of a verbose cipher or of any cipher. One could say the same thing of Linear B or of any previously unknown writing system or cipher. One could even say the same thing about the English text in Latin letters that we are writing right now. Technically, if we didn't know the script in advance, each letter could represent any sound. But that doesn't mean that we can therefore say that "the probability that the way we are reading these words as English is actually the 'right English text' is only 1 in 26! or 1 in 10**8". 

The critical issue is, having chosen one possible deciphering of the script as one's hypothesis, does it work or not? In other words, how closely do the Slavic VCI readings resemble the Old Polish / Silesian words? And how coherent is the Old Polish / Silesian text that is thus produced? Those are the key issues that I see in evaluating the interpretation.