The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

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.

The problems isn't that what you say above is very hand-wavey -- although it is. The problem is that your draft paper appears to be asking me to accept two fundamentally quantitatively inconsistent claims regarding spaces in the SPS:

* In Section 3.4, treating uncertain spaces as spaces, you conclude that, "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. More precisely, to 1.089 words." That implies a bound on how undersegmented the Voynichese can be. If "...the Author often missed word breaks when taking dictation....", then according to this claim he/she didn't miss more than ~8% of them.

* As I pointed out in my earlier post, treating uncertain spaces as spaces results in only 129 of the occurences of 'daiin' being as a word, with all but 8 of the remaining 177 occurences being as a word suffix or prefix. Which implies a far higher rate of undersegmentation if we assume 'daiin' is typical. And requires an explanation if we are asked to believe it is not.

With regard to error rates involving spaces on the part of an ignorant scribal copyist, while I need to read Alan Farne's thesis (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) in detail (particularly Chapter 4 -- "I discuss in Chapter Four the need to better understand the scribal habits of manuscripts written by scribes who wrote in their non-native language."), it's worth quoting from his summary of his work at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: 

"....I have transcribed, collated, and analyzed all three of these codices by test passages in order to determine the scribal habits of the scribes of 0319 and 0320. All three of these manuscripts are Greek-Latin diglots. There were two surprising conclusions from the analysis of these manuscripts: first, the scribes of both direct copies neither added nor omitted any words. They broke even completely on word count. Not only did they break even but they had no variants of adding or omitting any words. They copied their exemplar almost exactly. They did make many substitutions, spelling errors, and nonsense errors, but they did not add or omit a single word. Which leads to the second surprising conclusion: these scribes were this accurate because of their ignorance of Greek. These manuscripts are diglots with Greek and Latin and an analysis of the scribal habits shows that these scribes were more proficient in Latin but had very little knowledge of the Greek language. They therefore copied the text extremely accurately but when they made a mistake it was an egregious mistake which usually resulted in such a nonsensical error that the result was not even a real Greek word. I have therefore tentatively concluded that scribes who do not know the language they are copying may copy extremely well for the most part but when they reach a difficulty they may produce an extremely obvious error."

So it sounds like (lanugage-)ignorant scribes do very well with regard to their accuracy copying spaces. (Farne's work came to my attention because at one point I was searching for data on scribal error rates in order to try to quantify at what point appealing to scribal error as an explanation for exceptions to a proposed rule of Voynichese behavior becomes unreasonable).