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IIRC, the distribution of letter frequencies doesn't really fit with it being an alphabet for a natural language.
by taejo 13y ago
IIRC, the distribution of letter frequencies doesn't really fit with it being an alphabet for a natural language.
- kristopolous 13y agoI believe that presumes it's a traditional phonetic alphabet. I'm not a linguist by any measure, but the inventiveness I have seen in human languages gives me hope here. But let's assume this is an elaborate hoax by a masterful con-artist. Are you really claiming that someone spent so long crafting such a forgery, with nothing before or after - like some black dahlia of literature?
- trevelyan 13y ago> like some black dahlia of literature? What do you mean by this? I haven't heard the expression before....
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago> Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
- canjobear 13y agoUnfortunately, entropy measures don't reliably distinguish linguistic scripts from other symbol systems: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4652 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4652