The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[oshfdk]

Apologies if I misunderstood you.  I thought you said that I did search for a book that fit the statistics of the SPS, after I said that I did not.  

I think that you searched for a book that might be a source for SPS, a book that is the right size and structured in about the same way. Which effectively means that you were looking for a large collection of short paragraphs of about the right size (not page long, not just a few words long), which already puts a constraint on the statistics. The paper literally says "we noticed the SPS seemed very similar in size and structure to the SBJ", which is a qualitative version of a statistical match.

And you said that I tweaked the parag breaks to support the SPS≈SBJ claim; and that, I agree, would have been cheating.  But, again, no -- when I was revising the parag breaks, I had no idea of whether I was improving the histogram fit, or making it worse.  Again, in the end the change was not worth mentioning.

I said "Probably" because I assumed that the original statistics were not a good match. I'm not sure how this is cheating, if you have reasons to believe that the paragraph breaks needed to be revised and there is a consistent method for revising them. I assumed you would start with computing SPS statistics using paragraphs from the existing transliterations, but if you never did this before changing paragraph breaks, this couldn't affect the fit, so my "probably" was wrong.

I'm sorry if any of my replies sounded rude or insulting, I didn't mean them this way. I think I will excuse myself from this thread, because the discussion really gets heated and tedious at the same time.