VMs: Mixtures of languages in the VMS

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Regarding recent discussions of the possibility that the VMS is a mix of 
languages, encrypted:

While this is certainly possible, it seems to me like a dangerous 
starting point, because it offers so many "degrees of freedom".

It's like fitting a (polynomial) curve to a set of data points - by 
using  enough powers in the formula you can make the curve fit all the 
data points exactly, but that doesn't generally produce the best fit - 
between those particular points the curve can gyrate wildly.

The trick is to find a curve with enough degrees of freedom to describe 
the data well (thoyugh not perfectly), but not too many.

If the VMS were transliterated in some way, and all the resulting words 
were found to be exact matches with words in some group of seventeen 
different languages, that would be less useful (IMHO) that discovering 
that the words merely ressembled the vocabulary of one (or maybe two) 
languages.

Given the freedom of seventeen vocabularies and no common gramatical 
rules, it seems like you could make the VMS say almost anything ... 
beware, that way lies madness!

(Just my $.02)

Bruce




______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list