RE: VMs: Verbs at begin - arabic ??

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>We can reach also very small enthropy, if we remove dots above and below 
>arabic characters -
>then we cannot distinct B-N-T-Y and W-F and  S-SH  and R-Z and J-CH and 
>more.

>>Yes! That lowers the entropy immensely. I have read in various books,
that, originally, the Arabic alphabet lacked those dots, and that they
were introduced later. But I can hardly believe that. If it was so,
then reading a text in Arabic would have been a constant, painful
decipherment exercise. A completely dysfunctional writing system.
>>We have discussed it. It cannot be Arabic written as it now, with
those dots. We never thought of trying "dotless" Arabic, at least
as I remember. I do expect that the entropy of a text written in
"dotless" Arabic would be very low.

	Okay... how would you read it? Wouldn't that be like assigning
4 different characters to 1 VMS character? So, 'd' could be your choice
of B,N,T, or Y & 'y' could be your choice of W or F, and throw in vowels
at random -- I think it would be difficult to make this a rule that could
build confidence that the deciphered form was the only one possible...

John.


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