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Re: VMs: Line and paragraph as structural unit (Noise or data ?)

Hi everyone,

At 04:21 26/05/2003 +1000, Jacques Guy wrote: 
>I would be interested to see the result of applying Sukhotin's vowel
>algorithm to a text enciphered using a paired 15th Century cipher - I
>predict it would yield extremely strong false positives (and that this is
>in fact what is happening with the VMS).

Well, do it! The executable (for DOS) is somewhere next to BITRANS and
to MONKEY on the EVA site. I think it is called VOWELFQ.

Thanks for the pointers to that - I've been a little bit tied up with my dissertation over the last few weeks :-(, but I'll be sure to give it a go soon. :-)

I still find
it strange that it should give as vowels Voynichese letters or combinations
(<ee>) which happen to have the same shape as vowels in the common medieval
script known as Beneventan. And that EVA <a> <o> and <e> look so much
like our own a, o, and e.

Like you, I don't think it's coincidence - but I think that a set of vowels appropriated from a (fairly obscure) European language is more likely to be a deliberately misleading artefact of a pair cipher system than a structural feature appropriated into an artificial language. With luck, I hope we shall see whether this is testable...

>Such a small alphabet to have a schwa! And so common a letter! And to have
>schwas at the start of so many labels! How wonderful! :-)
Yes. The realization of /a/ (and often /o/ and /e/) in unstressed positions. Many languages do it. Russian for instance. As for having a schwa at the initial, look at English: "again", "alive", "ahead", "among", "aghast", "ahoy", "around". "Amazing" isn't it?

That wasn't really what I was flagging: you seemed to be suggesting that EVA <y> was a schwa (I presumed you meant in all positions), and it seemed a little curious to me that a European language would have a letter that was uniformly used as a schwa in all positions. Apart from strictly fo-nEt'ik alphabets, I'm not aware of any written languages having a specific schwa-letter (as opposed to a letter that acts as a schwa within certain contexts)... but is that wrong?

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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