VMs: Short Hand: [was: More questions]

[Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Barbara Blithered;
> >The other thing is that my very limited experience of "secret alphabets"
> >and "ciphers" is that they encipher not a spoken language but a
> >language's *written* form. What if the voynich author(s) made the
> >conceptual leap of enciphering a language's *phonemes* (rather than its
> >standard alphabet's values and spellings) and then added to that
> >contractions, abbreviations, truncations etc and then "spelling out"
> >things like punctuation coma run hyphen ins coma & nulls question mark

> Jacques Jzotted; 
> Has it occurred to you that you have just described shorthand writing?

Barbara Blithers;
No, "encryption" is a side effcet of shorthands, not their purpose,
which is speed of writing.
They have two stratagies; to record sound via quick and easy to make
marks (ie; fast penmanship), or by increasing the number of symbols;
logograms, syllabics, contractions, truncations, abreviations, etc;
using a mixuture of standard marks and neographemes (fewer graphemes per
semantic unit equals quicker writing). Those are descriptions of
shorthands ;-). Both require an expansion of the numner of graphemes and
thew VMS just dosn't have enough graphemes for a shorthand. A shorthand
would become deadfully confusing if its symbols were to have more than
one meaning.

WE can discount the first stratagy as the VMS characters are not
designed for being written quickly, paricularly the characters I beleve
you call [gallows] types, and the second because there are just not
enough symbols/garaphemes.

However, if the VMS authour ciphered phonemes, and each of the graphemes
used were multi phonemic.....
(EG; voiced/devoiced/voiced syllabic/devoiced syllabic/ letter name)
then the result would be almost uncrackable. Say for example the latin
letter /S/ stands for the usual digraph "sh" the values could be ; sh,
zh, ish, ezh, and "she" (usable both as a word in its own right and as a
syllable too in words like /[she]p/ = "sheep"), and as the suffix "-ish"
means "like/similar to" it could semanically replace that word/concept
in writing too. The result would be very different from any other
renasance writing system. A "null" letter (x in this case could indicate
voicing, context would illustrate syllablic usage (as in Runes) and
isolation via spaces wheould indacte "word/conceptual" use and a second
mark (say o) would indicate concept word-usded-as-syllable.

So you'd get S (sh) S(zh) S(ish) xS(izh) [space]S[space] would be either
"she" of "similar to", and as a word part "oS" would be either "she" or
"like" as a syllable within of a word. Think of the o+ and x+ pairings
not as digraphs but as linear diacritics such as the umpronounced
Cyillic "Yerr" (hard sign) which hardens the consonant it follows - a
linear diacritic, althouth a linear post- rather than linear
pre-diacritic.

Note: I've not used any VMS transcription systems in the above example,
jys whateve came first to the keyboard except the Cat ;-)

Barbara

 
This example, where a single grapheme has 6 phonomic uses and 2
conceptual uses, isn't crptogaphy, but a complex orthogathy: Nor is it
my invention, it is a real world example from the orthography of Runic
Writing, and one of the reasons that thop bristish Runeologist R I Page
opined; "There ase as many trananslation of a runic text as there are
runologists working on it - all mutually exclusive".




A totally Phonomic system using alphbetic-styled letters would t
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list