Another explanation for dain daiin...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

I'm not going to bore you with two pages of densely argued logic explaining 
why I think the following (I'll leave that for another day), but here's my 
latest prediction for what dain / daiin is.

"d<...>" means "copy the whole word <...> words back".

This is a form of data compression (to be more precise, it's the basis 
behind the popular "Lempel-Ziv 77" algorithm): the offset field is normally 
heavily biased towards low numbers (because locality of reference usually 
==> locality of relevance).

In a text stream (as opposed to a data stream), "copy(-1)" would be very 
very rare [ insert self-referential joke here :-) ], but "copy(-2)" and 
"copy(-3)" would be very common indeed.

Then: "an" / "ain" / "aiin" would indeed be (as recently suggested) 
hidden-in-plain-sight Roman numerals - after "d", they would be encoding 
*negative word indices*.

OK, I admit that, as I work as a data compression consultant, there may be 
an element of the "Golden Hammer" Antipattern at work here (ie, "when all 
you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"). But I still think 
I've hit this particular nail on the head. :-)

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