Re: Sukhotin's Algorithm

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Firth wrote:
 
> The basis of the algorithm is the observation that in most languages
> Vs and Cs have a tendency to alternate

> In fact, pretty much the entire English language
> could be cited as a counterexample!

True. Yet, the algorithm works well on English.
I even tried it, out of sheer bastardry, on
the southern dialect of Sakao, where words
are typically a string of consonants with one
vowel on the end or near the end. It worked
(I hadn't expect it to). There was an article
a few years in Cryptologia, entitled THE 
APPLICATION OF SUKHOTIN'S ALGORITHM TO 
CERTAIN NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGES
(sorry for
shouting, just pasted it off my hard disk,
too lazy to retype it) by George T. Sassoon,
where he applied it to some unlikely languages,
even .... transliterated Hebrew. The first
three "vowels" identified were yod, vav, he.
Then followed resh, ayin, zayin. You can't
win them all.. :-(