The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

What I have noted many times is that the per-word entropy (about 10 bits) is compatible with many natural languages, including East Asian ones, under any spelling system or encoding where each word is (almost) always spelled/encoded in the same way.  In fact, IIRC, it was rene who first made this observation.

Two points: 

1) I suspect that is a consequence of (and mathematically equivalent to) the ranked word frequency distribution being Zipfian given that entropy is a measure of how not-flat the distribution is -- while that's a property any theory of the nature of the text has to account for, it is a necessary but not sufficent property for the text to be words in a natural language, and 

2) as I observed earlier, your argument regarding 'daiin' requires assuming that roughly (at best) only 42% of instances of 'daiin' are written as 'daiin' (as opposed to as a prefix or suffix of another "word"), which does not qualify as an "encoding where each word is (almost) always spelled/encoded in the same way."