The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

A couple quick comments:

* There was an (inadvertent?) deletion of text at the start of Section 3.1 ("...instances of words, abstract strings o Independently of the precise...")

* Section 3.1 ("...eventually we confirmed that the distribution of the lengths of words from the Voynichese lexicon was indeed characteristic of a group of East Asian languages...") and Section 3.4 ("The average size of an SBJ parag is 36.97 Chinese characters, while the average size of an SPS parag is 33.95. These numbers are surprisingly close, and imply that, if the SPS is a version of the SBJ, then each Voynichese word in the former corresponds roughly to one Chinese character in the latter.") treat spaces as syntactically significant word separators, yet Section 4 ignores them ("(In this count and in the rest of this section we are ignoring word spaces in the SPS, so that kydaiin and daiiny count as occurrences of daiin.)"). I am troubled by the paper's assuming that spaces matter to claim word length and paragraph word count distributions match in Section 3 but then assuming they can be ignored to get matches to "daiin" in Section 4.