The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the distribution of the number of words between instances of words with a length-normalized edit distance below some threshold [...] is an incredibly significant statistical signature of the Voynich text that any theory about how the text is generated needs to reproduce.

Can you be more specific?

It's for Stolfi to address that issue -- quantitatively -- in the context of explaining/defending his theory.  [...] The "explanation" would be to show that the same anomalies that you see in the SPS are spelling system, and incidence of errors.

Can you see those anomalies in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.?

...I'm acutely aware that this is the "Chinese" theory thread (and not, for instance, the (AFAIK non-existant) "verbose cipher" theory thread), bur moderators and readers please bear with me because what follows will, in fact, wrap back around to being on topic...

I don't mind.  Besides, any argument you present for why the "Chinese" Origin theory (COT) is wrong will be in-topic.

3) results in a critique of Stolfi's approach here

First, note that the type-to-token ratio (TTR) of a text in any language usually depends on the text size.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (which may be just a consequence of Zipf's law) says that the size L of a a text's lexicon (number of "word types") is related to size N of the text (number of tokens) like L ≈ K sqrt(N), where K may depend on the language, style, topic, etc.  

So, when comparing TTRs of different texts, it is absolutely important to trim them to the same number of tokens.  Or instead compute the apparent constant K = L/sqrt(N)  instead of the ratio L/N.

Second, spelling and transcription errors can inflate L while having little effect on N.   Mandarin uses only 1300 syllables (~18%) out You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by the known phonetic constraints of the language. That means that changing one phoneme in a random syllable will, with high probability, increase the lexicon size L -- even if the change respects the phonetic constraints. 

Thus, when comparing lexicon sizes, it may be prudent to exclude word types that occur only once or twice.  Or maybe even more, depending on the rate of errors.

The Starred Parags section (SPS)  of the VMS has, by my count, N = 10875 tokens and L = 2749 word types.  The TTR would then be ~0.25, and Heap's K would be ~26.4.  if we exclude word types that occur only 1 or 2 times, we get L = 591 word types in N = 8386 tokens; the TTR drops to ~0.070 and K drops to ~6.45.

For comparison, that text above (which is Mandarin Chinese obfuscated by a weird but one-to-one spelling system, with no spelling errors) has L = 587 word types and N = 9458 tokens; the TTR is ~0.062 and Heap's K is ~6.03.  Excluding words that occur only once or twice, we get L = 376 and N = 9170, giving TTR = ~0.041 and K =  ~3.92.

Third, one must not forget that statistics -- word and character frequencies, correlations, Zipf's and Heap's law, etc -- are a property of a text, or a specific collection of texts -- not of a language.  There is no such thing as "the frequency of 'e' in English", "the most common word in Latin", "the Heap K of Mandarin".  Even if the dialect and spelling are fixed, those statistics are greatly affected by topic, style, nature of the text, cost of vellum, etc.  One can have a meaningful and grammatically correct text in English with 50'000 tokens and only 100 word types -- that does not use the word "the" even once.

All of which leads to wrapping this back around to discussing Stolfi's theory [...]. It's not *impossible* that Stolfi has stumbled into a solution with his approach, but [...] I think it is far more likely that he has fallen prey to the siren call of the "crib" that has lured so many mariners sailing on the treacherous seas of the Voynich Mss to their doom.

Well, what can I say?  I think that the matches I have found are quantitatively categorical.

Note that my solution is very different from most other proposals. I don't know what is the language and the encoding, but I claim that I have identified a specific plaintext (the SBJ) whose structure  matches the SPS much better than could be expected by chance.  Specifically, I have a small dictionary (the "cribs") such that those words occur in the SBJ with spacings that are very closely proportional to the spacings of the corresponding words in the SPS.  

AFAIK there haven't been many such proposals yet.  Maybe the "Book of Enoch" theory is one.  I know of another proposal for a specific Kabbalistic book in Hebrew.  Presumably such proposals are rare because they are unlikely to work for more than a few pieces of the text, and break down when one tries to extend them beyond that scope.

What he *should* be doing -- again, IMHO -- is taking texts in one or more SE Asian languages (dealer's choice), assigning some scheme for representing them with Voynich glyphs, simulating whatever "confused ignorant scribe" error processes he thinks are there, and then showing that you wind up with something that -- quantitatively, and for all the "greatest hits" properties (including "babble-like sequences of similar words") -- looks like Voynichese.

Well, you have that text above to play with.  Do you see "babble-like sequences" in it?

All the best, --stolfi