The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

1) I suspect that [entropy of 10 bits per word]  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

Indeed, given the information that the the word frequency distribution is Zipfian, and the size of the lexicon, one can compute the value of the zero-order word entropy.   The first property alone is not sufficient. 

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."

Word spaces are rarely produced in the spoken language, unless one deliberately makes a pause before each word.  (An old famous article on speech recognition is titled "How to wreck a nice beach").  Thus it will not be surprising if turns out that the Author often missed word breaks when taking dictation.  And then the Scribe, not knowing the language, may have got more spaces wrong when reading the Author's draft. (Did you see the "busillis" anecdote I posted a while ago?)

And the Author probably made many spelling mistakes when taking dictation. And the Scribe added some more when trying to guess whether a glyph on the draft was r or s, ch or ee  ...

If the SPS≈SBJ claim is true, all those puzzles will soon be solved.

All the best, stolfi.