VMs: Re: VMS numbering systems hypotheses...

[Dana Scott <dfscott@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

How would the 898989 sequence in the middle/right of line six in f14v and the
89890898 sequence in the seventh line be interpreted? I see a possible match to
the triplicates seen in the botanical drawing. And what are all those dots in
the first gallow? May match to the drawing as well?

Regards,
Dana Scott

FYI... I am planning on moving from California to Arizona at the end of the
month. Same job, different location. May be out of commission for a while.
{:-)

Nick Pelling wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> >         I was also going to broach the fact that a vast majority of
> > labels begin
> >with 'o' - and if 'o' was a number I would strongly suggest o==1.
>
> Because I suspect that the *encoding* was right-to-left, to my eyes these
> instances of "-o" and "-9" fall at the *end* of labels.
>
> In this context, two of my non-numeric predictions are that...
>
>          "-9" codes for...
>                  "-us",  or
>                  "-um"   (as in Tironian shorthand):
>
>          "-o" codes for...
>                  "-i"/"-e"       or
>                  " ",    or
>                  "(null)",       or for
>                  "-(as you'd expect)".
>
> This last would mean (in Shannon entropy terms) "the remainder of this word
> is as you'd predict it to be", ie "use the top-ranking candidate word in
> this context", like a word-level "..."
>
> Fo... ex..., th... is th... ki... of thi... I'm talk... abo...
>
> My guess is also that "9-" codes for "cum-" or "con-" at the
> (right-to-left) start of words - but that's another story entirely. :-)
>
> > >If we are sure that the all vms words are numbers, shouldn't we forget
> > >about cracking it, until the code book is found? :-/
> >
> >Not if it's a spelling code that uses various charts/columns/rows or the
> >like?
> >Something like - columnNR + rowNr from a basic default set for some words,
> >and chartNR+columnNr+rowNR for others?
>
> Given that I believe the VMS' underlying language is probably a mix of
> Latin and Italian, I suspect that verbs/nouns in the code book would need
> some form of conjugating/declining - and this is what I suspect much of the
> rest of the text is (though possibly in a obfuscated way).
>
> In addition: common words (like "cum", "et", etc) could well have short
> codes of their own - "89" [EVA "dy"] is a strong candidate, for example.
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....