18-05-2026, 06:34 AM
@stolfi You didn't answer my question about Spaces (it probably got lost in the mix), so I took the initiative and asked Claude myself. Since it's AI, take the following with a grain of salt, but it's still interesting:
The VMS’s restriction to a few high-frequency token beginnings (Top 5 = 72%) and very few token endings (Top 5 = 91%) corresponds quantitatively to Chinese syllable phonotactics: approx. 19–20 initials and 3–5 codas in Mandarin around 1400. If each token = one syllable, the limited variety of initial and final glyphs is a necessary consequence of Chinese syllable structure and consistent with it.
I would like to emphasize that I don’t have the slightest knowledge of Chinese and therefore cannot verify this in any way....
The VMS’s restriction to a few high-frequency token beginnings (Top 5 = 72%) and very few token endings (Top 5 = 91%) corresponds quantitatively to Chinese syllable phonotactics: approx. 19–20 initials and 3–5 codas in Mandarin around 1400. If each token = one syllable, the limited variety of initial and final glyphs is a necessary consequence of Chinese syllable structure and consistent with it.
I would like to emphasize that I don’t have the slightest knowledge of Chinese and therefore cannot verify this in any way....