VMs: RE: Various fragments of (possible) interest...

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> PS: flicking through the BL's copy of
> D'Imperio, she noted that Tiltman
> suggested that EVA ain aiin aiiin could
> be numbers - I missed that first
> time I read it. :-/


I guess I'm a bit confused at the pursuit of
numbers in the VMS.  I'm certain I'm missing
something.  If I assume that these end characters
are numbers, I would have to wonder at what
numbers occur so often, and at the end of strings
that are otherwise considered "word" structures.
Wouldn't that make every character in the VMS a
number?  And if they are all numbers, we're back
to the problem of what system of numerical
notation would use 23 characters on the average
for the herbal section.  Arabic numeral notation
(base 10) uses only 10 characters, and I'd guess
Titlman was thinking along the lines of the VIIII
strings familiar in roman numerals, but even this
system doesn't use an average of 23 characters per
page to write it in numbers, and it would be far
more patterned than the VMS if it did.

Of course, the Latin alphabet is nothing more than
a modulo 24 representation, and therefore a number
set, I guess, and since we must reduce language to
base 10 representations of its usage and
occurrence, making numbers the only means we have
of describing the detail of language, there must
be a very strong relationship between language and
numbers.  In that light I'd agree that these are
numerical representations of language, but
ultimately still language.

Geez, just writing this gets me confused! ;-)

GC