RE: Transliteration--Re: Gallows G characters

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Yes. Arguing against EVA on the basis
> that some obvious letters
> are represented by two or more, e.g.
> <in>, <iin>, <ee> which are
> very likely single letters, is like
> writing Spanish using the Czech
> alphabet because Spanish ch takes only
> one letter in Czech. Spanish
> or Polish (sz, cz). Or Hungarian (sz,
> zs, gy, cs). Or German
> (ch, sch, ss). Or Greek (where e, ai =
> e; i, u, <eta>, oi, ui, ei = i;
> mp = b; nt = d). And I'll leave aside
> French and Gaelic. And English
> (ee, oo, ng, sh, th...). Litmus test:
> image that English is an
> unknown language that remains to be
> deciphered. How do you transcribe
> "knighthood"?

Exactly my point, and thank you for clarifying it.
One does not write native English in Czech or
Polish, just as I don't write native Russian in
English.  The VMS is not a foreign transliteration
of some alphabet, it was written in a specific set
of characters.  And this is where our differences
become clear -

In my vocabulary no unknown language waits to be
'deciphered', since it was never 'enciphered' in
the first place.  No language I know of including
Chinese requires the systematic exercise of a
specific mathematical rule to render it
intelligible.  If this is simply language as you
suggest, EVA is fine as any language can be
transliterated by any system you please, though
this is usually done AFTER you've defined the
native alphabet and not before.  If it's cipher as
I suggest, the first thing that needs to be done
before anything else may be accomplished is to
define the unit of character, no matter what the
underlying language.  My opposition to EVA has
nothing to do with its use by language theorists,
since that's who it was designed for.

When you say "some obvious letters are represented
by two or more, e.g. <in>, <iin>, <ee> which are
very likely single letters.."  you make my second
point for me.  "Obvious letters" and "very likely
single letters" are transcribed by stroke instead
of character, although Rene just finished saying
that all characters that appear more than 10 times
were transcribed as single characters.  It seems
this isn't exactly accurate.  EVA is a major
departure from the understanding of Friedman,
Currier, D'Imperio, and a host of others from the
cipher camp.  As you've said, these are probably
single characters, but in all the time Frogguy and
EVA have been around, there has been no attempt
made to use these detailed transcriptions to
determine the unit of character, nor has this ever
been the stated purpose of these transcription
schemes.  This means that those who lean toward
cipher are laboring under an inefficient and
misleading system of notation - for their specific
purpose - and for those who've joined the fun
within the last year or so, the knowledge of
Currier and other transcription systems more
descriptive than EVA is almost completely lost.

I don't share enough common ground with the
Language camp to argue with the reasoning.  I'm
more or less speaking to the cipher camp on this
matter.  Maybe we can take EVA, define many of the
"multi-stroke" characters for what they are, and
turn the EVA transcription into EVA-2, so that at
least many of the characters are directly
transferable from one to the other and both
systems can peacefully co-exist.  That way counts
will make sense to everyone, columns will fit
nicely and observations can be posted in a
notation easily understandable to both persuasions
without spending a lot of time adding characters
and translating everything into "pronounceable"
EVA for people who ignore cipher posts anyway.
One way or another, it's time we stopped saying
these "are likely one letter" and do what it takes
to make the decision.

GC