The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[kckluge]

The problem is that there is no such thing as "the SBJ sensu stricto".

This is indeed a problem!  I don't see how we can definitively identify the text if we don't even know what the text is, and I don't see an explanation of how you are overcoming this problem.

Forget Chinese and the SPS for a moment, and suppose instead that someone finds an "Alchemist Herbal" in Italian (AHI) which has about the same number of plants as the Herbal-A section of the VMS (VHA).  He wonders whether VHA may be a version of AHI.  He notes the following things:

• The most common word in AHI, A, occurs seven times in the longest entry of the AHI.
  
• Eacluding two of them, the other five occurrences of A  are separated by  32, 13, 25, and 30 words.
  
• The most common word in VHA, V, occurs five times in the longest entry of the VHA.
  

I'd probably find it a little problematic if I looked at their own transcription of VHA and couldn't for the life of me figure out how they managed to conclude that V was "(t)he most common word in VHA". I already pointed out this problem with your repeated assertion that 'daiin' is the most common word in the SPS in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:

Looking at Stolfi's transcription (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), 'daiin' does indeed occur 306 times as a 5-gram ignoring spaces. Taking spaces into account that breaks down as follows:
[...]
Treating uncertain spaces as spaces:
129 as word by itself (9th most common word)
167 as word suffix
  2 as word prefix
  8 as "...d aiin..."
[...]
But there is another, bigger problem here -- why, in crowning it as "(t)he most common Voynichese word in the SPS," is 'daiin' treated as privileged? The actual most common word in the Stolfi's transcription of the SPS is 'chedy' (175 occurences) if uncertain spaces are ignored, and it's the second most common word if uncertain spaces are treated as spaces (205 occurences). It you ignore spaces 'chedy' occurs 545 times -- well over the 306 times for 'daiin.' So why isn't 'chedy' "(t)he most common Voynichese word in the SPS"? "Because the spacing of five of the 306 instances of 'daiin' fit fairly well with the spacing of five of the seven instances of 主 in one paragraph out of 365 in the SBJ" is not a good answer to that question.

To elaborate: here are the 10 most common words in your transcription of the SPS treating uncertain spaces as spaces:

  Word:   aiin  chedy       ar       al  qokeey    ol        y qokeedy  daiin      l

  Rank:        1        2         3        4         5        6        7           8         9    10
  Count:    255    205    204    184     155    145    133       132    129   126

So as stated before, 'daiin' as a word is actually only the 9th-most common word. OK, well maybe we didn't catch all the spaces. Let's suppose we consider cases where word <x> occurs as a suffix of some other word. As noted above, that adds another 167 instances of 'daiin.' The problem is, it also brings the total for 'chedy' up to 537 and for 'aiin' (excluding instances of 'daiin') up to a whopping 955.That's without bothering to run the numbers for words ranked 3-8. So if we include cases where <x> is a suffix in the count, how exactly is 'daiin' more common than 'aiin' or 'chedy'? Just counting those cases they are both more common than the total number of 306 'daiin' as a 5-gram ignoring spaces altogether.

If you addrressed that issue in an earlier reply I missed it.