The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

After commenting out the subsection titles on both files, I counted again the number of words and parags, and basic statistics (min, max, average, and standard deviation) of the number of words per paragraph (nwp):

Code:

    statistic  !  bencao !  starps     -----------+---------+--------     parags     |     354 |     330     words      |   10874 |   10457     min nwp    |       7 |      11     max nwp    |      76 |      72     avg nwp    |    30.8 |    31.7     dev nwp    |     8.5 |    11.2  

Considering the missing bifolio in the SPS quire, we have 6 surprising near coincidences: number of entries, and the mode, min, max, average, and deviation of the number of words per paragraph. (The total number of words is not an extra coincidence since it is the average npw times the number of entries.) 

With some numbers this looks more interesting to me. However, I don't see this as 6 near coincidences. The total number of entries is the obvious optimization parameter. You wouldn't even consider comparing Voynich stars section with a manuscript of 30 entries or a tome of 3000 folios. If I understand it correctly, the similar number of entries was one of the things that attracted your attention to the Chinese MS. If VMS had 30 entries, there would be another Chinese (or Arabic or Hindi) piece of interest with 30 entries and maybe a different origin story.

Min nwp is 7 vs 11, I wouldn't say this is remarkably close. In a list of arbitrary variable length natural language records it's expected that the shortest string lengths will be close to one another in absolute terms, because there is a  limit on how short a record can get, there are no records shorter than 1 word. Also, you decided to remove section titles from bencao, if I understand it correctly. Were they a later addition and not part of the original work?

Max nwp is more interesting, it is close. The average, the max and the mode being close probably just tell us that both distributions are somewhat bell-shaped and symmetrical. I'm not sure this is a surprising feature, I'd say this is expected for any list of natural language records.

So, in my opinion there is one true near coincidence - the max number of words per paragraph, 76 vs 72. 

I'd attribute this to pure convenience. If you are writing a long list of 300+ entries, you probably will try to keep them reasonably concise. 

Also, if we look at the specific points that create the right hand side of the curve, from where these two numbers originate, we can see that there is very little similarity in the distribution. If we removed just a single record from the red set, the numbers would become 72 vs 65. So, this near coincidence can be just that: a coincidence.

   

BTW, I'm not sure what method was used to determine the number of words for the Chinese manuscript.