Re: VMs: Voynich and bee-dance

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 28 November 2004 01:13, Jacques Guy wrote:
> "Later other researchers such as Wentian Li [10]
> have proven that Zipf's law also holds for less
> interesting phenomena, such as randomly generated
> sequences of characters."

I have the feeling that some think that as Z law appears in random sequences, 
then it makes Z law in languages understood or irrelevant.

I think it is neither of those.

Z law in randomly generated sequences is due to a *completely different* (and 
understood) reason compared with its presence in natural languages.
For random sequences it has to do with the probability of the word-separator 
character and the appearance of increasingly long strings. "Word" and "token" 
length distributions are therefore very much different from those in natural 
languages.

> I take exception to that. Show me a study of
> sign length and sign frequency in a Sign Language.
> (I suspect that Sign Languages do not follow
> Zipf's law). 

Absence of proof isn't proof of absence, but the idea is interesting. How does 
Sign language work? Is it word-substitutions? Can one translate a corpus into 
Sign language?

> At any rate, some of the examples 
> in that paper are clearly false, such as, for
> instance, the populations of cities. Try that in
> Germany!

Doesn't it hold there? (Am I missing something?).

Let's say that the VMS did *not* follow Z law. Would that be useful to know? 
I think so.
Knowing that Z law holds, then polyalphabetic (poly > 2 or 3) substitutions 
are less likely because each plaintext word should have multiple forms 
(depending on the alignment with the key). This pushes down the frequencies 
of all words and the plot becomes flattened (no power law).

Surely Z law alone does not *prove* the existence of a language, but in 
combination with other pieces of information it becomes (at least to me) more 
plausible to think that there is one disguised in some way.

Cheers,

Gabriel

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list