The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

f105v might have the longest paragraph, but you did pick the page in quire 20 with the oddest language.

Interesting analysis.  But the SBJ is organized into three sections according to the "grade" (potency/toxicity) of the remedies, and each section is divided into six subsections according to the source of the drug: minerals, herbs, trees, animals, fruits, and grains.  

The herbs subsections are the largest, but that longest recipe ("rooster") is smack in the middle of the "high grade/animals" subsection, which is only 15 recipes long.  The longest parag of the SPS ("poar keeo") is at the bottom of page f105v, which has 10 parags (counting by the stars and by short lines).  

While the SPS bifolios may have been scrambled and folded in the wrong order, the recipes within each page are probably consecutive recipes in the SBJ.  If so, page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. must be basically the first half of the "high grade/animals" subsection. That could explain why it is somewhat different from the other pages.

It would be interesting to apply to the SBJ the same analysis you did on the SPS.  Say, by splitting each subsection into 10- or 15-recipe blocks, computing the frequency of 主 and other common characters in each block, building the similarity matrix for those blocks, etc.

As far as I can see your analysis is based on the fact that the longest paragraph is high in aiin words

Not any aiin words.  Of the seven occurrences of  主, five match the five occurrences of the word daiin (2) or words ending in daiin (3).  The other two match an occurrence of dair and one of laiin, both as whole words. There is one extra occurrence of dair that does not match a 主.  Those are the only aiin words I considered.

And it is not just the number of daiins.  It is the fact that the positions of those seven words in that SPS parag match very closely the positions of the seven 主s in the "rooster" recipe -- apart from the fixed shift, that can be explained as the omission of the "taste and warmth" field of the SBJ recipe.

And you are asking us to believe that this is statistically significant?

Yes, because it definitely is.

It seems to me rather that the match with 'zhu' is only there because of the oddity of f105v, and that it is just a coincidence that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has both the longest paragraph and also the highest frequency of aiin words 

So you are saying that it is only a meaningless coincidence that the "rooster" recipe matched 105v.32, because that after all is the only page that happens to contain a parag that happens to match the "rooster" recipe.  

It is like saying that it is just a meaningless coincidence that the cage labeled "lion" at the zoo has a lion in it, because previous analysis had already identified the cage labeled "lion" as the one that had the highest number of big cats with manes in it.

All the best, --stolfi