RE: VMs: provable?

["Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oops...I made a couple mistakes in my comment.  I leaped into the database
queries without looking at the source texts.  The statistics were correct,
but my examples were wrong:

The Qur'an has "bismi 'llah", as two words, not as one.  The modern term
"bismillah" (as a noun) doesn't occur in the Qur'an.

Additionally, my source for Biblical Hebrew was not the Talmud but the
Torah, which has "v-et ha-aretz" (vt h'rZ) as two words, not "et-ha-aretz"
as one.

Mes apologies.

Brian Tawney

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Tawney [mailto:btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 9:02 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: VMs: provable?


Voynich Manuscript: 8453 distinct words, of which 71% occur only once
Talmud (no vowels): 18801 distinct words, of which 61% occur only once
Vulgate Bible: 41849 distinct words, of which 47.52% occur only once
Qur'an (no vowels): 14769 distinct words, of which 58.28% occur only once

In each case I treated a "word" as being a space-delimited token, so Arabic
"bismillah" is treated as one word (bsm'llh) instead of three (b-ismi-llah),
and Hebrew "et-ha-aretz" is treated as one word instead of three, and so on.

The VM is slightly high in terms of unique words...but not really so
extraordinarily high, especially when compared to inflected/affixal
languages.

Brian Tawney

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Rene Zandbergen
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 8:11 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: provable?



--- Marke Fincher <markefincher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> P.P.S   I think it is vital to bear in mind at all
> times that over 6000 of the 8700 VMs
> words occur only once in the whole manuscript.

Is that number correct?
How would it be for an English / Latin / German
text of the same size?

If a text exactly follows Zipf's law, this
relationship
can be predicted. Since Voynichese deviates from
Zipf's law in the same manner as English etc,
one would not expect the above relation (6000 : 8700
if the numbers are correct) to be unusual.

Cheers, Rene



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