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Comment by brig90 | Hacker News Reader

Yep, that was my takeaway too — the structure feels too consistent to be random, and it echoes known linguistic patterns.

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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).

>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

I wouldn't assume that the writer made decisions based on these goals, but rather that the writer attempted to create a simulacrum of a real language. However, even if they did not, I would expect an attempt at generating a "random" language to ultimately mirror many of the properties of the person's native language.

The arguments that this book is written in a real language rest on the assumption that a human being making up gibberish would not produce something that exhibits many of the properties of a real language; however, I don't see anyone offering any evidence to support this claim.

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