RE: VMs: [ha] [hb] not different languages

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Rene,

At 00:31 04/08/2003 -0700, Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> --- Nick Pelling wrote:
> > as I neither believe that words are aligned with
> > words nor believe that letters are aligned with
> > letters, ....
>
> There are a lot of things that cannot be explained
> if you follow this belief.
> It is one thing to assume that the plain text
> words are composed of several apparent VMS words.
> This means that some spaces are real, others are
> not. Labels could then be single letters or
> abbreviated words.
> It is quite another thing that the PT spaces
> fall in the middle of VMs words. That's completely
> at odds with the presence of labels and I also
> don't see any evidence supporting it.

IMO, the labels are a bit mysterious, whatever your theory. For those 
holding a linguistic position, labels should surely provide some kind of 
way to get under the VMS' skin (like the "Pleiades" label) - AIUI, the 
history of referents in language is largely a history of 
mutations/borrowings - yet here we see text written in a novel language 
with no apparent borrowings at all. Similarly, for those taking a 
cryptographic view, labels should surely help provide cribs of some sort - 
but this too has failed to be true.

In other words, the presence of labels doesn't seem to be supporting 
*anyone's* pet theory, regardless of what view you take of spaces. FWIW: my 
current working hypothesis is that - astrological labels aside - many may 
be acronyms, simply as a kind of mnemonic device. Sure, it's a bit of a 
lousy theory, but ATM labels look like a poor data-set AFA everyone is 
concerned. :-(

Evidence is a tricky beast - as there appears to be neither precedent nor 
antecedent for the kind of tricky combination of shorthand, space 
transposition cipher and verbose cipher I'm trying to describe here, I 
don't have a dataset to build up comparative/correlative statistics with. 
We don't even have (AIUI) any examples of actual tachygraphy from this 
period, to get a feel for the kind of shorthand abbreviations that were in 
use - so you might say I'm swimming in a large lacuna. :-o

However, the next obvious evidential stage would be to perform statistical 
analyses at the pair cipher level, to build up a statistical picture of 
what's going on there. Any particularly interesting features found there 
might help sway opinion that - at the very least - there's evidence of a 
pair cipher / verbose cipher at work in the VMS. We'll see!

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


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