[split] Torsten's criticism of Bowern & Lindemann

[Torsten]

[Edit KG: this thread split off from here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. ]

The primary sources for the article appear to be interviews with Lisa Davis and Claire Bowern

You are guessing, and you are guessing wrong. I know of at least five people who have been involved, and there were probably more.

No guessing is required since the article is actually about Lisa Fagin Davis and her views about the Voynich manuscript. Yes, the article does mention other perspectives, including two sentences about Andreas Schinner and my research. But, the sole purpose of these two sentences is to serve as an introduction to Lisa Fagin Davis's perspective on our research. And I know for sure that Ariel Sabar never asked us about our research.

For instance the article states "The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words were similarly language-like." The contrary is true. The word length distribution matches almost perfectly a binomial distribution and is therefore not language like.

This suggests that there should exist a good test for what is language-lilke and what is not. Well I don't think so.
Stolfi did not write that the word length distribution is not language like, and anyway, Stolfi is not a linguist. Neither am I for that matter.

I can't decide for myself to what extent the text is language-like, but at first sight it is very language like, while in important details it is less so. Saying that it is not language-like would be more incorrect in my opinion.

Claire Bowern, a linguist, states: "Short words tend to be the most common words in natural language texts, but the most common Voynich words have four or five letters." [Bowern and Lindemann 2020].

In linguistics, the brevity law (also called Zipf's law of abbreviation) is a linguistic law that qualitatively states that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter that word tends to be. Zipf (1935) posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances communicative costs (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). For example, consider the length of frequently used words in English, such as "a", "is," or "I".