The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[pfeaster]

My point is that the statistics of the character "-s" before "are" do not tell us anything except that there is some deviation from statistical independence.  That alone is neither meaningful nor revealing.   We only begin to understand why the deviation exists by looking at the words that caused it.  

Here's a playful analogy:

In a base-10 system, all multiples of five end with the digit 0 or 5.  For example, 12345 and 43210 are both multiples of five.

My position: Investigating that final digit looks like it might be worthwhile.

Your position: No, the study of individual digits is a dead end -- the only unit worthy of attention is the entire number as a unitary whole. After all, any patterns found among digits are caused by the numbers in which they appear.  This alleged pattern involving numbers ending in 0 or 5 will probably turn out to be an illusion on further investigation -- or else there will be so many potentially complicating factors that we won't be able to distinguish the noise from the signal.  Besides, we know from the following multiples of seven -- 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 -- that it's possible for the final digit of a number not to reveal in any meaningful way whether that number is a multiple of some other number.

And another playful analogy:

Consider a hypothetical text of unknown character in an unknown script and language.  The characters found most often at the ends of words in general are @ (12%), $ (10%), # (8%), & (7%), and ^ (6%).  But if we limit our study to the words that appear before one particular word -- ~+*/% -- the character most often found at the end of those words is, by far, ^ (60%), although no specific word or words predominate among them; we just find a lot of different words that end in ^.  

My position: Golly, that's remarkable!  What kinds of explanation(s) could we find that would be consistent with a pattern like that?  Could this give us a clue as to the structure of a language?  Or the mechanism of a cipher?

Your position: That statistic alone tells us nothing. Not only that; the type of statistic is all wrong as well. We instead need to be looking at the words that most frequently precede ~+*/%.  Anything else is just going to cause confusion.

Returning now from analogy-land:

If we were trying to "decipher" Culpeper (and had no knowledge of the English language), the observation that words ending in [s] are so much more common than usual before [are] would actually be a useful crib in practice -- more useful, I'd say, than any statistics about the specific words that precede [are].  It may reveal nothing in itself, I suppose, but for someone seeking a linguistic solution, I believe it would suggest the hypothesis that [s] is a morphological marker that correlates somehow with the word [are].  That hypothesis would be correct.  The [s] is the regular plural marker on nouns; [are] is a plural copula.  A decipherer wouldn't know that yet.  But noticing the pattern (and pondering possible explanations for it) would be a step in the right direction, and enough steps in the right direction might eventually lead to a solution.

On the other hand, with an analytical/isolating language like Chinese, I suppose no such clues should exist -- which I suspect may be why you're eager to rule them out in the case of the Voynich Manuscript. That motive wouldn't invalidate your reasoning, of course, but it's probably worth acknowledging openly, if only to clarify what's at stake.

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-?"

Of course, there are many words that can precede "are" and yet are not plurals either.  Those cases might outnumber the irregular plurals.

Still, this researcher you posit who gets "forever stuck" strikes me as rather a naive kind of straw man.  I could equally posit a researcher who somehow identifies and collects hundreds of English plurals without ever noticing that they tend overwhelmingly to end in [s] -- remaining convinced a priori that "statistics about characters tell us nothing."

I guess each reader of this thread can decide independently: in Culpeper, is the statistic that words preceding [are] are a lot more likely than usual to end in [s] a useful data point or not?  If you could have an equally revealing data point about Voynichese -- no more revealing, no less revealing -- would you want to have it?