Why and how the text could be Bavarian

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Distribution of shXXX words (exact tokens only):

Sorry for insisting, but since you are claiming that your observations refute the Chinese Origin theory, I must make sure that I understand them, and check whether that is indeed the case.

I understood that you have two claims about the VMS. The first claim is that a Sh at the start of a word "attracts" (or "is attracted to"?)  a qo at the start of the next token.  The second claim is about the attraction of words that start with Ch compared with those that start with Sh; let's discuss this second claim in a later post.

I would rephrase your first claim as there is a positive correlation between event S0 -- a token starts with Sh -- and event Q1 -- the next token starts with qo. 

As noted in my reply to @chenxiang, about 15% of the words in the VMS start with qo.  Therefore, that claim is true for a given word ShXXX if more than 15% of its occurrences are followed by a qo-token.  If that fraction is less than 15%, the correlation is negative: the word ShXXX actually repels qo-words.

So, from the first table in your post, we can say that Shaiin, Shedy, Sheedy, Shey, Sheody and Sheol show positive correlation (attract the qo- prefix), while Shar, Shol, Shor and Shy have a slightly negative correlation (repel the qo- prefix).  Do you agree?

So it does not seem correct to say that "the Sh- prefix attracts the qo-prefix".  The attraction or aversion to qo is a property of some specific Sh-words, not of the Sh prefix.

And you also claim that, when we consider all Sh-words together, we see a net attraction.  That is, on the whole, a Sh-word is followed by a qo-word more than 15% of the time.  But that attraction is the weighted average of attractions and repulsions by the various Sh-words (including all those that are not listed in your tables).  The average is positive only because the Sh-words that attract qo are more numerous and/or have a stronger effect than the Sh-words that repel qo.  Do you agree?

Do you think that the observations so far are incompatible with the Chinese Origin theory or the SPS=SBJ claim?

I have just looked at the frequencies of the pairs "ShXXX YYYY" where XXX is edy, eedy, eey, ol and or, and YYY is anything. I see that the attraction or repulsion depends not only on the specific Sh-word, but on the specific qo- and non-qo-words that can follow that Sh-word.  For instance, while Sheol and Sheey have similar levels of qo-attraction (~37% by your table), the qo-words that can follow one are rather different than those that can follow the other.

I think I see some other interesting patterns in those counts, but they are too complicated and uncertain to discuss here.  Suffices to say that those counts seem to confirm my hunch that qo is a symbol that means "and", like our &, and is in fact a "barrier" for word-word correlations.

All the best, --stolfi