Mystery text's language-like patterns may be an elaborate hoax

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NEW SCIENTIST

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230934-500-mystery-texts-languagelike-patterns-may-be-an-elaborate-hoax/

Marcelo Montemurro at the University of Manchester, UK, disagrees. He has used statistical analysis to compare the manuscript’s structure to classic works in several languages. The text has too many layers of complexity for a simple hoaxer to produce, he says.

“It’s not impossible that these tables can generate Zipf’s law, in the same way that it’s not impossible to win the lottery 10 times. It’s still very unlikely,” he says. “Bringing in all of these narratives to explain something makes it sound so far-fetched. They are writing a thriller, not a scientific paper.”