Re: Sukhotin's Algorithm

[Mark Perakh <perakh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Why would anybody try Sukhotin's algoritm on Hebrew which has no letters
for vowels at all?  I wonder how it can work on any language given the
fact that the Sukhotin'sd premise seems to be obviously wrong.  In Finnish
vowels very often are doubled, while in Czech and Polish consonants often
appear in groups not diluted by vowels?  I cannot think of any language
where V's and C'c are indeed more or ess evenly distributed..  Of course,
unlike Frogguy, I am not familiar with those exotic languages he has
mastered. Jacques, would you please explain how that alg worked, as you
said it did? Or it entailed some features besides the supposition of the
V's and C's distribution? M

Jacques Guy wrote:

> 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.. :-(