Re: VMs: Re: Quick question

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Gibson wrote:

> Your  question about left-right text is very good.
> There are MANY things
> about the VMS that hint that the base language was
> not European, but Middle
> Eastern in origin. The artwork, however points to a
> Medieval origin. Unless,
> as some suspect, the manuscript ?? Middle Eastern,
> but illustrated or
> re-illustrated by a European scribe at a later date.

I have always loved that scene in "the Name of the
Rose" where the young chap is completely confused
by a book that doesn't contain words but 'worms
and fly poops'. His first encounter with the Arabic
script. I don't remember if that was the
movie (English) or the book (Italian). 

Many important sources in the Middle Ages would
have been written in various langauges using the 
Arabic (orother) script. One good way of making
a hoax (or a clever cipher) would be to take 
such a text and 'transcribe' it. The change of
writing direction (if needed) does not worry me
at all. 
 
> Has anyone worked out a frequency table for the VMS
> using EVA, and has this
> frequency table been applied to as many languages as
> possible, checking for
> mirror as well as normal layout? 

Most simple statistics that have been produced
about the VMs text are independent of the writing
direction. In particular the often published,
anomalous entropy values are.

The difficulty in checking the VMs (in my opinion,
or rather "in my case") are obtaining usable 
source texts for comparison in electronic form.

Cheers, Rene

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