re: EVA Transcription

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

16/01/02 03:29:11, "GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>If they were to discuss 8am instead of daiin, 

They might think it's an appointment out of a diary, 8am, no?
Seriously now, m, or iiv, or iin, if it is m, occurs only
word-finally in the VMS, never word-initially. For the life
of me, I cannot think of a language which does that. A
cipher? Yes, if it is steganographic. BUT, then, what of
the labels? They are too short to accommodate nulls. So,
me, a linguist to whom everything looks like a language, I'd
say that this m, or iin, or iiv, merely marks the nasalization
of a preceding vowel (like final m in Portuguese), and that the
VMS language had only one nasal vowel: a. Just like many other
natural languages.

Oh, and then, once in a blue moon, you find EVA an, Frogguy
av, in the VMS. So you do need another "letter" if you made
iiv (or iin) just m.


> or 4oHcc89

4oqpcc89

I avoided uppercase letters, because they require you to
hit the shift key, which is extra work, and I am so 
dreadfully lazy that I will go to no end of hard work
to make my life easier. And then, doesn't qp look a great
deal like the gallows it's meant to represent, left and
right loops included?


>3- if you haven't established some idea of what a unit of text is in the
>first place, you haven't progressed far enough to come up with a workable
>theory.

Very true. If you can pick up the courage to wade through the 
megabytes of archives, and painfully, slowly, read the stuff, you'll
see that I have broached upon the subject many times under such titles
as "the segmentation of continuous texts" or whatever, singing the
praises of one Russian researcher, B.V. Sukhotin, whose last 
publication dates back to... 1974 I think. His seminal ideas on
language, the nature of language, its analysis, were never taken up,
except in an obscure PhD thesis about his vowel recognition algorithm.

Yes, I am a linguist, but I am not proud of linguistics as it is
practised nowadays. Not proud at all.