Comment by nine_k
1 day ago
In short, the manuscript looks like a genuine text, not like a random bunch of characters pretending to be a text.
<quote>
Key Findings
* Cluster 8 exhibits high frequency, low diversity, and frequent line-starts — likely a function word group
* Cluster 3 has high diversity and flexible positioning — likely a root content class
* Transition matrix shows strong internal structure, far from random
* Cluster usage and POS patterns differ by manuscript section (e.g., Biological vs Botanical)
Hypothesis
The manuscript encodes a structured constructed or mnemonic language using syllabic padding and positional repetition. It exhibits syntax, function/content separation, and section-aware linguistic shifts — even in the absence of direct translation.
</quote>
Yep, that was my takeaway too — the structure feels too consistent to be random, and it echoes known linguistic patterns.
I'd be surprised if it was indeed random, but the consistency is really surprising. I say this because I imagine that anyone that would be able to produce such text is a master scribe that put countless hours writing other works, so he's supposed to be very familiar with such structure, therefore even if he was going for randomness, I would doubt he would achieve it.
> the structure feels too consistent to be random
I don't see how it could be random, regardless of whether it is an actual language. Humans are famously terrible at generating randomness.
The kind of "randomness" hardly compatible with language-like structure could arise from choosing the glyphs according to purely graphical concerns, "what would look nice here", lines being too long or too short, avoiding repeating sequences or, to the contrary, achieving interesting 2D structures in the text, etc. It's not cryptography-class randomness, but it would be enough to ruin the rather well-expressed structures in the text (see e.g. the transition matrix).
1 reply →