[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Folding keys etc...

Hi Steve,

-=se=-> again you lost me here, the folding KEY has but 9 areas
available on it

When I mentioned 8 lists, that's 9 areas less the blank one in the middle. :-)

The characters found under a LONG Gallows are inserted 'simply' across
the top (left to right) and down to the bottom "so if the characters"
were say 1x,2x,3x,4x (space) 5x,6x,7x,8x then:

AREA on KEY PAPER Character

         C        =     1x
         A        =     2x
         D        =     3x
         H        =     4x

         E        =     5x
         G        =     6x
         B        =     7x
         F        =     8x

OK: so, to reconstruct the key, you'd go through all the pages, find all the long gallows (like your Figure 11), grab the set of 8 characters beneath/following them, transferring each of those characters into the 8 "short gallows" areas on your key in turn, in the order you've listed above.

I'm with you so far. :-)

And even if there were some pages missing from the VMS, we could (probably? possibly?) deduce what the remaining missing long-gallows-following-characters needed to be for each of the 8 lists: so all we'd have to do is guess their order.

But - given that the VMS arrived in a number of separate pieces, and the folio numbering (in the top right) looks like it was added 100 or more years later (probably), how would you know *in which order* to add the long gallows sets?

ie, if you had even just two sets of long gallows, followed by...

        #1      o p 8 a   o t c m
        #2      9 4 4 9   m p p 8

.....would the first ("C") area contain [ "o", "9" ], or would it contain [ "9", "o" ] ?

Or: would it simply not matter? As we don't have the original alphabet list anyway, we'd have to guess the second list regardless?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....