The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

[rikforto]

Hold on, everyone. Is the claim of network connectivity about the *language* or the *representation*?

This is something of a leading question since I am fairly sure the answer is the latter, and therefore no matter how good the statistics fit, we can rule out any Romanized representation fairly easily---unless someone here wants to go to bat for simple substitution with the Latin Alphabet.  We know it's neither Romanized Bavarian nor (I assume) Romanized Chinese. Bear in mind that Mandarin, conventionally written and analyzed, has an edit distance of exactly 1 between every word, but a different finding in Pinyin, and a different one still in Bopomofo and so on.

This observation bears on the conclusion in the paper at hand, though its by no means Torsten's only line of evidence. The fact that both a Germanic text and a Sinitic one have similar lexical connectivity in certain representations would imply that at high connectivity does not preclude that Voynich is a comparably distributed representation of any language in the Voynich script.

(A subtlety here: It may not be the case that all languages can be so represented by the Voynich script, I can't just rule out any of them out of hand.)