24-04-2026, 09:14 AM
@oeesordy:
On the entropy point: I've tested that against actual MHD corpora. "Ortloff von Baierland" shows 75.4% Levenshtein-1 connectivity, "Breslauer Arzneibuch" 72.8% — basically the same range Timm claimed was unique to artificial text.
So "low entropy / many word repetitions" isn't diagnostic of a hoax - it's what you get with german medieval medical texts in general.
As for the conlang-from-substitution idea: that would require an author inventing a language with consistent morphology and syntax. A medieval scribe around 1430? That seems rather unlikely.
And I don’t want to discuss modern forgery theory in this thread, because that’s a completely different topic and would distract too much from the actual subject… I ask for your understanding.
On the entropy point: I've tested that against actual MHD corpora. "Ortloff von Baierland" shows 75.4% Levenshtein-1 connectivity, "Breslauer Arzneibuch" 72.8% — basically the same range Timm claimed was unique to artificial text.
So "low entropy / many word repetitions" isn't diagnostic of a hoax - it's what you get with german medieval medical texts in general.
As for the conlang-from-substitution idea: that would require an author inventing a language with consistent morphology and syntax. A medieval scribe around 1430? That seems rather unlikely.
And I don’t want to discuss modern forgery theory in this thread, because that’s a completely different topic and would distract too much from the actual subject… I ask for your understanding.