Re: VMs: Re: NSU review of Rugg (2003)...

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

18/12/2003 4:13:15 PM, Gordon Rugg <g.rugg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I think that the manuscript can now be accounted for economically using only
>meaningless gibberish as an entity, with no need to invoke meaningful text as a
>second entity.

First, they are not two entities, one to be posited after the other, but
they are two alternative, mutually exclusive entities.

Second, when I first came across an English text, it was complete
gibberish to me. You could not even read it aloud: "the knight"
indeed, how do you say that? (It was a translation of Don Quixote).
I only knew that it must mean something because I knew that my
father spoke English.

A few years later I came across some Italian. It was in a comics
magazine, translated from the Italian, but a whole page had
the balloons untranslated. Now _that_ was gibberish. I remember:
"la tavola". What a ridiculous language! Then I figured out
some sentences, because the words looked like some strange 
distortions of French. I concluded that, for some weird reason,
the author had decided to write a whole page of gibberish,
modelling it on some sort of degenerate French.


Third:

>However, if the grille and table method fails to account for all the
>features of the manuscript ...
>then we do need two entities

That is putting the cart before the horses. For this argument
to hold, you need to demonstrate this:

Given a meaningful text T, there exists no grille and table
method that accounts for all the features of T.


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