Re: VMs: Worry - information loss in transcription - pictures ...

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 22:05 29/08/2003 +0200, Petr Kazil wrote:
> GC writes - in his well stated opinion :
>
> > I predicted that if EVA took center-stage over efforts to improve earlier
> > transcriptions, it had the potential to misguide the thinking of an entire
> > generation of VMS enthusiasts who were never exposed to earlier
> > transcriptions before coming in contact with EVA.
>
> > And
> > forget Stolfi's interlinear - he's ripped the heart out of every other
> > researcher by transliterating their works into EVA.
>
> I dared to study the text itself, but I fear GC has a point here and it
> would be bad just to skip over it. What do the other "old timers" think of
> this comment. Are we throwing away information in our transcriptions? Is the
> transcription more "lossy" than it should be? Is it worth it to re-study the
> basic units of the text?

GC's criticism of people who try to use EVA's statistics as the gateway to 
the VMS is, of course, completely valid. Rather, EVA was designed to be a 
kind of sub-glyph-level transcription, so that the text as written could be 
stroke-modelled without being conceptually-modelled.

Even so, I believe the kind of information-loss-through-transcription fear 
GC and Petr express is probably overstated: IMO, the vast majority of the 
VMS is clearly and unambiguously written, and you'd have to be looking for 
something like a substroke encoding layer for there to be anything 
significant to lose (errrm.... just don't go there).

I've said it before & I'll say it again - I think that many 
frequently-occurring pairs of letters (such as <ot>, <or>, <ar> etc) 
function as single tokens, and that that alone can make a nonsense of the 
best-executed statistical analysis. Whether that's a kind of extra 
cryptographic layer and/or a different transcription is another question, 
though - regardless, the transcriptions we currently use are probably 
usable, if we only knew what we were looking at...

> The same way we can try to make hypotheses about the provenance of the
> characters themselves - abbreviations, shorthand, etc. Difficult stuff.
> Then, when we know the pedigree of the characters we will also be able to
> make a better guess at what a "character" really is.

I think that we can answer most questions on this already - the alphabet 
contains elements of:-
- Tironian notae
- tachygraphy-like letter shapes
- obscure European letters (Beneventan, etc)
- legal ornament (gallows)
- humanist stylisation (letter separation)

Put them all together, and ISTM that we're looking at a widely-read 15th 
Century European lawyer with a humanist education and a working knowledge 
of several shorthand systems - and almost certainly well-versed in 
cryptography. Of course, that describes Cicco Simonetta perfectly, so I 
would say that, wouldn't I? :-)

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


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