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

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi GC,

At 22:13 03/07/2003 -0500, GC wrote:
> Again I'm back to the pesky half-spaces and why they're such a problem.
> ... 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?

Given the general idea of pairification, my view on half spaces is that 
they probably appear for one of two reasons:
(a) ambiguity reduction on the part of the encoder (writing onto wax tablets)
   [[unless paired ciphers have some degree of ambiguity, they're probably 
too obvious]]
(b) lazy familiarity on the part of the copying scribe (copying paired groups)
   [[if you know everything's in groups, why make them look any different?]]

So: my guess is that most full spaces are fake, and that most half spaces 
are real (mainly to help disambiguate the paired ciphertext). While you're 
coming from the transcription end here, & I from the cipher end, between us 
we're probably looking at the same thing here. :-)

> 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.

Also, as per Philip Neal's general observation, note that f58r has a 
clearly matching pair of f gallows on the first line with a key-like 
sequence between them:
        [ch-ol-f-y]  sh-op-ch-y  ot-or-al-ch-y  [ch-of-ch-ol...]

> 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.

Well... actually, I've said from the start that, yes, that's #1 explanation 
for the herbal section: however, a number of quite different things (like 
Dana's Novara eagle emblem, amongst others) have (only very recently) 
started to change my opinion for roughly half of it.

So, you've got my position right, but not the direction I'm swimming in. :-)

> The astronomical/  astrological also demonstrates University
> training in the art.

I'm not so sure: AIUI, circular zodiacs were just as likely to have come 
from (say) an art or architecture tradition (as in the Palazzo della 
Ragione in Padua) as from an astrological education.

> Nick's already onto this in his sense that there is a "paired" encoding.
> That's only a step away from what I see.

Note that, while a lot of the pairing is perhaps fairly obvious (ol, al, 
or, al, of, dy, etc), I don't actually have a complete idea of how the 
entire pairification (would "groupification" fit your Weltanschauung 
better?) system actually works: for example, in my f58r transcription 
above, EVA <chy> could well be a group, rather than <ch-y>. All suggestions 
for more plausible pairing/grouping systems gratefully received! :-)

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


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