Re: Transition between languages A and B

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Philip Neal wrote:

> >I can also confirm from my experience (and numerical
> >results) that there are clear 'dialects' in the
> >different sections. Sometimes a single feature
> >like words ending in -ody as mentioned above can
> >be found. Remember further that Currier based
> >his A/B classification only on a subset of the MS.
> >He did not use the astro section and little
> >of the pharma (IIRC). These two actually bridge
> >the gap between the two. This gap can be illustrated
> >by words which 'belong' to each section, and which
> >show a typical transition in the language or
> >spelling or whatever:
> >
> >chol -> cheol -> cheody -> chedy
> >
> >I don't mean to imply that these words all mean the
> >same! These are simply words which can be found
> >particularly in specific parts of the MS.
>

It seems to me that a possible explanation might be this:

The fact the the VMS has low entropy compared to natural languages and that the
words appear very structured, with certain combinations only as beginnings and
others only as endings, suggest a sort of "one from column A and one from column
B" idea. For example, say there are five groups of beginning strings (with
several strings in each group), and five groups of endings. The Latin characters
could be encoded as pairs of numbers from 1 to 5, say A = (1,1), B = (1,2) etc.
and the scribe would encode each letter by picking a beginning string and an
ending string from the appropriate groups to create a word.

If this were the case, it would not be surprising if the scribe frequently (but
not necessarily always) made the same choices to represent a certain character
repeatedly in a block of text. At the same time, it would not be surprising
either for him to gradually change the choices, over time - even more so if the
encoding were done in different sessions or by different scribes.

This is just an example of how it might be done, but it seems like it would
explain the low entropy, the structured word patterns, and the variation in
particularly frequent words.

Bruce