Why and how the text could be Bavarian

[JoJo_Jost]

@ Aga

Unfortunately, your posts really just show that you haven't truly understood the underlying problem. But maybe I don't understand what you're trying to say either. Still, if you agree, you should reply in Stolfi's chat so the discussion doesn't get scattered. If that's okay with you. But as I said, I can’t move it over there until tomorrow at the earliest. If you wait to reply until I’ve done that, then everything will fall into place again.

Leider weisen deine Posts eigentlich nur darauf hin, dass du das zugrunde liegende Problem nicht wirklich verstanden hast. Aber vielleicht verstehe ich auch nicht, was du damit sagen willst. Aber du solltest, wenn du einverstanden bist, auch dann in Stolfis Chat antworten, damit das nicht zerfasert. Wenn das okay ist für dich. Aber wie gesagt, ich kann das erst frühstens morgen da hinüberschieben. Wenn du mit deiner Antwort wartest, bis ich das getan habe, dann passt wieder alles zusammen.

[Aga Tentakulus]

Oooo.....
Definitely my mistake.
I’ve been comparing EVA (ch) with (ih) all along, rather than with (Sh). ch ih Sh
You can imagine that comparing 5 examples with 1,000 was a bit of a joke for me.
As I said, I’m sorry.
I just don’t work with EVA.

Oooo.....
Eindeutig mein Fehler.
Ich habe jetzt immer EVA (ch) mit (ih) verglichen und nicht mit (Sh). ch ih Sh
Du kannst Dir vorstellen das Vergleiche von 5 Beispielen mit 1000 für mich ein Witz war.
Wie gesagt, tut mir Leid.
Ich arbeite eben nicht mit EVA.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the point is that I wanted an explanation from you as to how this fits in with the Chinese theory.

OK, forget the Chinese Origin theory for now, until I post more evidence evidence.

But since you created the word-based table of the Sh/Ch/qo correlations (thanks for that!), and I checked into it in some detail, I think we should finish the discussion of this topic.  

Would you agree with the conclusion that the "remote attraction to qo" is not a property of token-initial Sh, but rather of certain common words, like Shedy, that happen to start with Sh?  And that some other common Sh-words show no attraction to qo, or even strong repulsion?

For VBM, especially in the REVA analysis (Eva reverse), this phenomenon isn’t a problem at all—because it doesn’t occur at the token level here, but within words and when read backward, it sort of dissolves.

I still don't understand this point.  If we don't know what causes a statistical "anomaly" -- like a correlation between certain characters in adjacent tokens  -- there is no reason to say that the correlation is "okay" if it manifests in one direction, but "anomalous" or "unnatural" if it mainfests in the opposite direction.

In romance languages, the gender of an adjective must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies; and the gender often determines the last letter.  For example, in Italian one must write "casA biancA" but "vinO biancO".  

Thus, if you analyze letter correlations in an Italian text, you could conclude that "an A at the end of a word attracts an A at the end of the next word".  But, if you only have the letter statistics, you could also say that, vice-versa, "an A at the end of a word attracts an A at the end of the previous word".  

And if you reverse the text (including the letters in each word), so that the examples become "Acnaib Asac" and "Ocnaib Oniv",  the statistics will be the same except that they will say "an A at the start of a word attracts an A at the start of the next word".  Or vice-versa.

So why do you say that the remote attractions that you see in normal Voynichese text "dissolve away" in the reversed text?

All the best, --stolfi

[Stefan Wirtz_2]

Why valuating a correspondence of the most frequent vord-beginning characters?

This would say that several quite frequent characters are appearing quite frequently and are somehow "neighbored" just by their numbers.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Why valuating a correspondence of the most frequent vord-beginning characters?  This would say that several quite frequent characters are appearing quite frequently and are somehow "neighbored" just by their numbers.

It is more complicated than just "there are lots of words that begin with Sh followed by words that begin with qo".

By my count, ~15% of the words in the VMS begin with qo.  If each word was independently chosen without regards to the context, then, for any word X, about 15% of the occurrences of X would be followed by a qo-word.

But in fact 53% of all occurrences of Sheedy are followed by a qo-word, whereas for Cheo that number is less than 2%.  And these discrepancies do not seem to be the result of sampling noise.

This sort of statistical "anomaly" is quite common in natural languages, simply because adjacent words are usually related by grammar and semantics.  

By themselves, these statistics do not say much about the nature of Voynichese.  But they may help when combined with other clues or hunches.  

In English, for example, the Martians may notice that the words "this" and "that" tend do be followed by "is" more often than expected by chance, whereas "the", "thou", "thus", "they", "them", and "then" do not.  That would be a hint that the first two words play similar role in the grammar or have similar meanings, distinct from those of the last six.

All the best, --stolfi

[Stefan Wirtz_2]

It is more complicated than just "there are lots of words that begin with Sh followed by words that begin with qo".

By my count, ~15% of the words in the VMS begin with qo.  If each word was independently chosen without regards to the context, then, for any word X, about 15% of the occurrences of X would be followed by a qo-word.
[..]

Others count 13.85 for q, ~16.5 for ch, ~8% for sh.

Quite a lot of representation, so that's the stats. You may have a correlation, but not really a conclusion by it.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Others count 13.85 for q, ~16.5 for ch, ~8% for sh. Quite a lot of representation, so that's the stats. You may have a correlation, but not really a conclusion by it.

Again, that "anomaly" was not "the frequency of Sh-tokens is similar to that of qo-tokens".  It was "the frequency of qo-tokens after Sh-tokens is greater that of qo-tokens in general".  

This claim does not depend on the freqency of Sh-tokens.

All the best, --stolfi

PS. The ~15% for qo-tokens that I quoted was for my transcription, deleting all commas and counting "-" as ".', and considering only tokens whose first two EVA characters are letters [a-z] (not weirdos or '?').  If I had treated commas as spaces and considered all tokens, the percentage would indeed be lower than 15%.

[JoJo_Jost]

@ Stolfi

Regarding the long-range effect: I don’t know how to describe this any more clearly—it’s really similar to the oq case. Here, the relationship between o and q is “more natural” when read backward; in a certain sense, it’s a dependent structure, and no one would check here to see if oq backward would be an atom (but the nearly 100 percent dependency remains, after all).

And exactly the same applies to the sh / k / ch phenomenon. The same dependency does not imply the same step-by-step selection structure. This refers to the linguistic level; when read backward, the long-range effect—although mathematically present—is easier to “explain” because it is cumulative—just as with “oq,” only here it spans multiple glyphs, yet still without a “jump.”When reading backward, the (as mentioned, existing) structure is not noticeable; it blends in with the other distributions of the glyphs. See the diagram:

   

[JoJo_Jost]

OK, forget the Chinese Origin theory for now, until I post more evidence evidence.

But since you created the word-based table of the Sh/Ch/qo correlations (thanks for that!), and I checked into it in some detail, I think we should finish the discussion of this topic.  

Would you agree with the conclusion that the "remote attraction to qo" is not a property of token-initial Sh, but rather of certain common words, like Shedy, that happen to start with Sh?  And that some other common Sh-words show no attraction to qo, or even strong repulsion?

No, I don’t agree with the first part of your conclusion. I do agree with the second part, though: Some sh-words fall below the general qo-occurrence rate. I’ve never disputed that.

But “below the overall average” and “more frequent than the corresponding ch-form” are not mutually exclusive. That is precisely why I compared forms with identical second parts. For all 21 sh/ch pairs examined, the qo-occurrence rate is higher on the sh side. Even shor can be below the overall average and still occur before qo more frequently than chor.

This does not prove that sh itself is the cause. But your conclusion—that it is merely due to certain common words that happen to begin with sh—is also unsubstantiated.

The finding is this: Given the same remaining token structure, sh is associated with a higher qo frequency in all examined pairs than ch. The fact that the absolute frequency also depends on the remaining token structure does not refute this correlation.

PS: And just so this doesn’t get forgotten: The “k” before “edy” is the weakest glyph relative to “qo,” at only 28%, compared to “sh” at 51%—not “ch.”)

[JoJo_Jost]

I've listed the entire table to illustrate the effect of the various glyphs on “qo” before the “edy” cluster.

As you can see, the whole thing looks more like a structure than a “language.”