(9 hours ago)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:The hypothesis that a text is written in an awful semi-phonetic, inconsistent version of some Asian language is therefore unfalsifiable.
I would agree. You can butcher the language unknown for you so much that it indistinguishable from gibberish.
I understand that it looks that way -- if you don't bother to look at the details: how much "butchering" is actually allowed, and how likely it is that the matches are just coincidences.
Unfortunately the VMS
IS full of errors -- many more than one finds in a typical Medieval manuscript. Because of what it is, and how it was created.
But scientists know that, given enough data, it is possible to reliably extract a faint signal from a torrent of loud noise.
That is how they prove that a new sub-atomic particle exists. That a snow white star a hundred trillion km from us is surrounded by seven invisible dwarf planets. That the solid core of the Earth, 5500 km deep and under more than 2000km of ultra-hot liquid iron alloy, was rotating about 0.2 degrees per year
faster than the crust in the 1970s, but has been slowing down, and since 2010 it has been rotating more slowly than the crust.
Or that a text which had 95% of its letters replaced at random by other letters is a translation of
Hamlet in Albanian -- but with a happy ending.
So I am still extracting recipes from the Zenghe Bencao, running my matching programs on them, and looking for more cribs. Eventually the mass of results will be un-dismissible...
All the best, --stolfi