VMs: left & right word entropy

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everybody,
Reading back Akinori Ito's very interesting paper on left & right word 
entropies (sorry I can't give a link as I re-discovered a pdf copy floating 
in my hard drive) kept me thinking about the "directionality" of the vms 
text.

I understand that his findings may be interpreted to point to a lack of 
grammar.
I just can't imagine a natural language in which the words do not have some 
determined order in the text flow (Jacques?).

This takes me to think why this could happen, and again to think about the 
possibility of lossy encodings.
Let's suppose that initial-<y> codes for different things, as in Cappelli's  
abbreviations for com-, con-, cum-.
If this was the case we end up with a collection of different words that are 
written as one. If there was any favoured directionality in the flow of the 
text, then I think that any direction bias would disappear and thus vms-words 
would appear to be balanced between their left and right entropy.

Same thing with the plume <'>. If this is a "missing letter/s" abbreviation 
(again following Cappelli) probably vms-words with plumes may be different 
words even if they look the same.

Same thing with the <i> strokes as mentioned a few messages ago.

Any comments?

Cheers,

Gabriel


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