The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There is a certain amount of déjà vu in this 

Indeed!   

Back in the SSG times, when I proposed this theory on the mailing list, friends like Rene politely informed me that it was nonsense; while the others reacted as if I had claimed that the government put fluoride in the vaccines to make us think that the Earth is round.   

But that is not why I stopped working on the VMS.  On the contrary, I sopped because I became convinced of that theory -- but it meant that I did not have the knowledge needed to make further progress, and had no hope of acquiring it.

 The official romanisation of Thai does not write out any tone information.

But what is that romanization used for?   Anything more substantial than person and place names?

I have one example from a Romanised Chinese language or dialect (Minjiang) about which I know nothing specific.

AFAIK Taiwan still uses You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a romanization that encodes the tones by varying the spelling of vowels and consonants, without diacritics.

It has a low entropy, but not a comparable bigram distribution to Voynichese.

Again, character entropy is problematic.  The word entropy is more interesting: it should be the same for any spelling -- as long as word breaks occur in the same spaces, and distinct words remain distinct.[/quote]