RE: VMs: Why VMs spaces behave like normal word spaces

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all,

I generally agree with Rene's assessment on the space issue, to a point.
Again I'm back to the pesky half-spaces and why they're such a problem.  If
you look in the old interlinears, you see that several different
transcribers read these half-spaces differently, so in these cases there is
some disagreement as to whether these are actually spaces.  I myself
transcribe a section, and when I go back and proof it, I have to sit and
look at these and ask myself, should I show a space here, because I didn't
notice it when I transcribed it the first time?  I generally rule in favor
of a space, and I see that others have done so as well.  But is this the
correct way of doing this?  Is a statistical pause actually a space?

In many cases if we transcribe without half-spaces, we wind up with 89 and
am in the middle of words, which defies our modern convention, so we don't
do it that way.  Somewhere someone said that 89, am and oe were common word
endings, so we end the word there and start a new one.  But what if this is
not what the author did?

What if he wrote in groups, and used the half-space for something different
than the full space, which would be the proper word terminator?  We'd then
have to throw out all of our rules and conventions concerning word
beginnings and endings, and instead begin to look at the text in more of a
"group" approach than a "word" approach.

And why not?  So far we've discovered that every time someone says "always"
with the VMS, some idiot like myself will sort through and pull out 20
instances where "always" ain't so.  "Almost always" is not a percentage, and
my personal favorite is "the majority of the time", which if scrutinized
will probably show I'm using this term instead of the proper "significant
amount".  None of these are percentages, which means we are expressing our
general impressions instead of dealing with actual facts.  We could be
shaping our impressions based on facts, but the reason we don't have some of
these facts is that we haven't encoded enough information into our
transcriptions to be able to make these judgments.

I know Gabriel and Rene spent a great deal of time pondering these
half-spaces, but like myself, they settled for the space instead of a
half-space character, so neither of our transcriptions encode this
problematic but "significant" feature.  For me this is not a problem, since
I think I know what these spaces are intended to do, but it is a serious
oversight on my part to follow convention and omit this feature from my
transcription.  I suppose I'm going to have to go back on the final run and
make these corrections.  Any ideas for a good half-space character?

I just pulled up a random page while I'm writing this (f58r), and this page
has numerous half-spaces throughout.  The half-spaces are indeed about half
the width of normal spaces, and if these are considered as "groups" instead
of "word breaks", then this page has "exactly a large amount" :-) of 11 and
12 character words.  That fits for me because astrological texts have some
very large words in their text, much larger than the regular herbal page.
If these aren't spaces, then we have a text (with many large words already)
that has words big enough to be a prime example of a western
astronomical/astrological page.  With a reasonable transcription we then
have enough information to do some word length comparisons for western
languages from texts written on the same subject matter.  Recording the
half-spaces as full spaces gives us a bunch of three and four letter words,
too many for a western astrological page on average.

You can argue that these are indeed three and four letter words, but given
the apparent subject matter, this is unlikely.  It's not just on this page
that this holds true.  In every section the word lengths are too short for
the subject matter, but when the half-space problem is dealt with, the word
length becomes appropriate to the apparent subject matter.

So why the heck is a lowly red-neck trying to preach his religion to
cultured Europeans like yourselves?  It could be I just don't know my place,
or more probably because I ain't never been cultured enough to make
something into something it isn't.  A silk purse is perty, but it still
comes from a worm's ass, and a sow's ear is part of what makes good bologna.
To me an herbal is an herbal, and astrological drawings and starred text
have something to do with astronomy/astrology as it was viewed in the
period.  Saying it's something different is like saying Picasso was an
artist.  It just ain't so, no matter how many times you repeat it.
Michelangelo was an artist, and Picasso wern't no Michelangelo.

The facts are very simple here.  Visual information in the manuscript
indicates overwhelmingly (100%) that this is a western manuscript.  Not
Chinese, not Russian, not Slavic, not Hebrew, not Polynesian, but Western
Christian.  Some drawings, such as the young boy chasing the girl, and a few
of the "suns" have a tinge of Greco/Roman to them, again imagery widespread
in Christendom.  Along with the western clothing, hats, crosses, and other
significations, there are the drawings that define the sections we all know
so well - herbal, antidotary, astronomical, astrological, balneological
(probably more to do with fluxes than baths) and biological.

There is no Russian character or imagery present, no Slavic, no Chinese, no
Polynesian, no Hebrew, no Antillean and no Klingon.  ALL (100%) script
correlations can be mapped to Western origins, mostly numbers, abbreviations
and shorthand.  ALL (100%) of the imagery has a meaning and parallel that
can be found in Western manuscripts.  ALL (100%) of the sections of the VMS
we've come to know so well were part of a Western Physician's training, and
they're even in the right order, for christ's sake!  I just don't have the
culture to see it but for what it says it is, but we local yokels are known
for our trusting ways, so I wouldn't be able to tell if all these hundreds,
nay thousands, of details are nothing more than a front for something else.

But what's this rant have to do with half-spaces?

Nick says he's finally coming around to thinking the herbal may actually be
an herbal, but the simple fool I am, I've been there from the start, mostly
'cause there ain't nothin' to say it's anything more than an herbal.  If the
herbal is an herbal, Sir Nick, then maybe the astrological is an
astrological etc.?  Keep pecking away and you'll finally get where I was
some time ago, and when you do, you'll begin to see the problem I'm having
with the half-spaces and the word lengths.  Compare texts of the proper
subject matter and things don't add up.  We keep repeating the saying "The
word lengths are too short" for just about everything we want to compare it
to.  Low entropy, short word lengths, clear division between word
beginnings, middles and endings, it must be something else than it says it
is.

If everything about the VMS (100%) says it's Western, then it's a pretty
good chance (100%) that it's Western.  If everything about it (100%) says
its the work of a Physician or Medical Practitioner, then it's the work of a
Physician or Medical Practitioner, not a cryptographer or codebreaker.  (We
know it's someone higher than a simple pharmacist because of the biological
drawings).  The astronomical/  astrological also demonstrates University
training in the art.

The difficulty here is not for me to experience, rather for my European
friends to bring themselves down to my level and see things through these
red-neck bloodshot eyes.  Then you'll see that the word length is
inappropriate, but with the half-spaces gone, things look a lot different.
Nick's already onto this in his sense that there is a "paired" encoding.
That's only a step away from what I see.  The answer to life, the universe,
and everything may be 42, but there is that "what's the actual question"
thing that requires a much greater rethink.  Meanwhile, I say pooh on
current VMS convention.  The whole plot is in need of a rewrite, and some of
the VMS characters need to be replaced with new and exciting faces!

GC





> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
> Behalf Of Nick Pelling
> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 6:30 PM
> To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: VMs: Why VMs spaces behave like normal word spaces
>
>
> Hi Rene,
>
> >This very property is
> >exploited (in a way) by Sukhotin's algorithm to
> >separate vowels and consonants. Interestingly,
> >the space character has a variation in preceding
> >and  following characters which is marginally
> >higher still than that of vowels.
> >
> >That last property is also observed in the Voynich
> >MS. I made the calculation many years ago.
> >I made a 'scatter plot' (every point representing
> >a character of the alphabet) plotting conditional
> >entropy of the preceding character vs. that of
> >the following character. The character that
> >appeared furthest to the upper right was the space
> >character, both in Latin and in Voynichese.
> >
> >So, I don't see anything particularly suspicious in
> >the VMs spaces.
>
> Unless you can compare data-sets across a time-dimension, statistics talk
> of correlation, not of causality. As I said (towards the start of the
> thread), I'd be extremely impressed if anyone could find a way to
> prove VMS
> spaces are either real or artificial - for now, the jury is out (and have
> ordered sandwiches for the next six months - but luckily they're in
> Scotland, so they have the option of "not proven"). :-)
>
> Alternatively, the postmodernist (well, Derridan rather than Lyotardian)
> view would be to say that anything so close to both signal and
> noise would
> have to be some kind of function of both - but why would a language (or
> transcription) need to include noise? For a postmodern analyst, then, I
> think the VMS would have to be a combination of code (signal) and
> hoax (noise).
>
> Just my $0.02 worth (or should that be euros now?)
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>
>
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