The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

@ Stolfi, The problem I see is that you have to make more and more assumptions to support this theory.

Plese clarify -- which theory and which assumptions?

If a word-final glyph like -y is more common in a certain context than in the whole book, then the frequency distribution of words in that context must be different from their distribution in the whole book.  This is not an assumption or conjecture; it is a hard and simple mathematical deduction.

If you look at the structure of the “edy” families, it is broader and deeper.
For example, I could remove all standalone “shedy”s, and the effect would roughly remain the same. Precisely because there are  other cases with a glyph preceding them: “dshedy,”, “olshedy,” even “qokshedy,” and other variants.

The striking anomaly for "-s before and" in my example was caused in good part by a single word "vertues", from the field title "vertues and uses".  But, in general, the difference in word distributions need not be dominated by a single word.  

In your example of "-s" before "are", the difference is spread over many words -- namely, the word "they" and many words ending in "-s" are more frequent before "are", while other words are less frequent.   

In your example, it was still the case that the words that were enhanced were highly correlated with the ending "-s".  But the feature that actually determined the enhanced frequency was not that letter per se, but whether the first word was plural or singular (or a second-person pronoun).  It so happened that, in English, words that end with "-s" are often plural, and vice-versa.  But there are many exceptions, like "they", "men", "women", "teeth", "feet", "people",  "children",  "mice", "dice", "sheep", "fish", "deer", "phenomena", "fungi", ...   

If one focuses on the statistics of characters, like the final "-s" and initial "a-" one will never realize that a certain set of  words -- including many that do not end in "-s" -- are the real cause of the statistical anomaly.  One would get forever stuck at puzzling "why is the ending -s attracted to a leading a-?"

To be sure, sometimes it is the case that character correlations across a word gap are actually due to the characters, independently of the words.  An example in English would be the (guessed) increased frequency of "-n" before words that begin with "a-".  That would be due to the pronunciation quirk that changes the indefinite article "a" into "an" before such words.  

This statistical "anomaly" should not depend on the rest of the second word; so, in that side of the gap, it would indeed be a character-level phenomenon.  However, even in this example, if one looked at the first word, instead of just its final letter, one would notice that the effect is almost entirely due to the two words "a" and "an" -- not to the final letter being "-n".

And here, too, you need yet more assumptions to argue this within the context.  So you can make the assumption that qo = “and,”

The proposal that qo means "and"  is a separate, specific guess, that is motivated by other observations.  It could help explain the anomalous frequencies of certain endings before qo-words.  But I don't see how one could disprove or prove that guess with that sort of character-level statistics.  Or any statistics.  If qo indeed means "and", it may affect the distribution of the previous word -- and hence of its final glyph -- in arbitrarily weird ways, for all sort of peculiar reasons.  Like how "and" enhanced the preceding final "-s" in my "vertues" example.

And, again, there is nothing remarkable in the fact that the frequency of -y endings before qo-words is different from their frequency in the book as a whole.  It would be remarkable if there was no difference.

Explaining all these structures within the context of a language in this natural form, however, will be difficult—very, very difficult...

Yes indeed.  And that is one of the reasons why many attempts at "deciphering" the VMS have failed: because they were doomed from the start by the assumption that the solution would be "easy" -- like a Caesar cipher or the Enigma code.  But any "exotic" natural language is much, much more complicated than that... 

All the best, --stolfi