The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Yavernoxia]

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.:

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.

Good point. I’m sure that if one randomly chooses another medieval manuscript whose text is composed of many lists and short paragraphs, one can find statistical properties similar to those proposed by Stolfi, especially if one allows manipulation of spacing, the distribution of suffixes and prefixes, and similar features. For example, the Speculum historiale section of the Speculum Maius by Vincent de Beauvais may be a good candidate.