Ruby's Greek Thread

[Anton]

What? If you can prove it's not a cat, case closed, because the two situations are mutually incompatible.

Something being Greek and it not being Greek are two situations mutually incompatible as well. Just been alarmed by the invocation of logic, you know

There would be markers for something being something, and there would be markers for it being not. I'm nearly zero in Greek, but speaking e.g. of Russian, if you are able to show that a text contains articles then by virtue of that you prove that it's not in Russian, because Russian does not have articles.

Regarding the OP question, this would depend on whether the text is considered to be a rendering of natural language, to begin with. If it is, then let's say frequency tables (those for letters and words) could show that it is not Greek. More generally, statistical characteristics of the text would suggest that the foundational assumption does not hold true, and then it is not Greek just by virtue of it not being a natural language flow.

But if the question is rather to disprove that the language behind the text is Greek, then I'm afraid it's difficult to approach from that direction at least until "real" word tokens are reliably extracted. Because we are not sure in word boundaries or if some kind of character transposition is not in place. Personally I would not approach it from that side. I would rather select a range of "candidate languages" like Latin, Italian, German etc. based on non-text markers (like cultural/provenance context, imagery etc.), and then try to reverse engineer the message based on vocabularies and statistical characteristics of those languages.