Re: VMs: Nick's curl above Eva-ch

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rene,

At 02:40 13/07/2003 -0700, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> > One last thought on <ch>: whatever your position on
> > the VMS, I think you
> > have to take a view on what the set of
> > diacritic-like marks above the <ch>
> > is all about.
>
> Two comments:
>
> 1) At first sight, the same question could be asked
> about the meaning of the little tail in Q, that
> distinguishes it from O
>
> But that is not a good parallel, since the Latin
> O and Q do not appear in similar positions in
> similar words. But that raises the second comment:
>
> 2) the same question about the pair of characters
> Eva-ch and Eva-sh could be asked about Eva: t and
> k, about o- an qo- (i.e. word-initial), about l
> and r.
> Each of these can be exchanged for each other
> freely, as if a binary decision is to be taken
> at each point.

I completely agree - how could a language be constructed where the 
vocabulary is so malleable that several pairs of letters appear to function 
in some kind of interchangeable way?

Fortunately for my piece of mind, this is something of a non-issue for me: 
I see these kind of low-level artefacts arise as arising from the internal 
symmetry of a pair cipher, manifesting themselves as the letter-adjacency 
behaviour of an artificial "interior language".

In fact, it may be possible to use these - (t, k), (o, a), (l, r), (o-, 
qo-)... - to try to discern the underlying symmetries of some of the 
code-pages:-

        -l      -r      -s
o-      ?       ?       ?
a-      ?       ?       ?

[I'd be tempted to put <am> in this table, but I don't recall seeing <om> 
with any significant frequency anywhere (please correct me if I'm wrong).]

        -f      -k      -p      -t
o-      ?       ?       ?       ?
qo-     ?       ?       ?       ?
y-      ?       ?       ?       ?

And how about: d / dy / od ? ? ?

One other thing: on f77v (for example, where I just happened to be 
looking), there are some example of <qol>, and <qoraiin>, but also <qoas>. 
Now, I'm not convinced that the patterns on this page are 100% 
representative of the whole VMS (as many seem slightly unusual), but they 
do seem broadly suggestive of the idea of pair *contraction* - that is, 
wherever <qo> is followed by an <o-> pair, the two adjacent <o>'s seem to 
get contracted one into the next.

So, perhaps...
        <qo> + <ok> => <qok>
        <qo> + <ol> => <qol>
(but)   <qo> + <as> => <qoas>

No great theory here, just a few observations and thoughts, make of them 
what you will. :-)

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


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