04-02-2023, 05:23 PM
Hi Koen and Marco. I've been following this thread. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the implications of this experiment. From a layman's perspective, I'm quite tempted to jump to the conclusion that it provides strong evidence for a meaningless VMs text. But that's premature and not at all parsimonious.
I do feel comfortable, however, concluding that your experiment provides good support for Currier's famous observation that "Vords are not words". And as such, if they encode any meaningful information at all, that information relies very little on what could be called syntax, for its encoding. In other words, your experiment is robust support for the old observation that vords do not seem to have much pattern to their order, in stark contrast to the rigid patterns of glyphs within vords. There clearly are some patterns to the order in which they occur, at the level of the line, paragraph, and page. Patrick Feaster has amply demonstrated this in his paper "Rightward and Downward". But these patterns are subtler and statistically very unlike those of the words of a plaintext passage in a known language.
If the VMs text does indeed contain meaningful information, I could see each vord encoding a single letter of the Roman alphabet. This could be supported, I surmise, by running your experiment on a readable plaintext, with every letter treated as its own token. The problem, of course, is that this specimen would have a maximum of 20~30 types. This might be able to be corrected for by enciphering the text in a many-to-one fashion, using enough possible encodings for each Roman letter to reach a number of types as high as the VMs, but I'm really not sure if this would still make a valid comparison.
Your results are also compatible with the VMs text encoding real information that's inherently non-linguistic, for example, map coordinates or musical notes. That would be a lot harder to prove, though.
I do feel comfortable, however, concluding that your experiment provides good support for Currier's famous observation that "Vords are not words". And as such, if they encode any meaningful information at all, that information relies very little on what could be called syntax, for its encoding. In other words, your experiment is robust support for the old observation that vords do not seem to have much pattern to their order, in stark contrast to the rigid patterns of glyphs within vords. There clearly are some patterns to the order in which they occur, at the level of the line, paragraph, and page. Patrick Feaster has amply demonstrated this in his paper "Rightward and Downward". But these patterns are subtler and statistically very unlike those of the words of a plaintext passage in a known language.
If the VMs text does indeed contain meaningful information, I could see each vord encoding a single letter of the Roman alphabet. This could be supported, I surmise, by running your experiment on a readable plaintext, with every letter treated as its own token. The problem, of course, is that this specimen would have a maximum of 20~30 types. This might be able to be corrected for by enciphering the text in a many-to-one fashion, using enough possible encodings for each Roman letter to reach a number of types as high as the VMs, but I'm really not sure if this would still make a valid comparison.
Your results are also compatible with the VMs text encoding real information that's inherently non-linguistic, for example, map coordinates or musical notes. That would be a lot harder to prove, though.