Re: VMs: Work on the relation penstroke -> letters?

["Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Pelling incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote
on 13 January 2004 10:31


> Hi Elmar,
>
> At 08:34 13/01/2004 +0100, Elmar Vogt wrogt:
> >Yet most people seem to take the current tanscription schemes for
granted,
> >and
> >only give a fleeting glance to this question which I feel is very basic
and
> >fundamental. So, did I miss research which clearly answered that
question, or
> >are people simply taking the transcription for granted, since it's easier
to
> >tackle with the statistical apparatus we have?
>
> You're absolutely correct - EVA isn't (what GC would call) a
> glyph-transcription, but is rather (closer to) a stroke-transcription.
> Given the ambiguity over what-is-or-isn't-a-glyph, this is so that you can
> construct your own glyph-transcription (for example, if you think iiin is
a
> glyph, pre-process it so that *is* a glyph) for doing your own statistical
> analysis.
>
> For example, looking at "raw" EVA word lengths - though relatively
> interesting - is fairly likely to be absolutely misleading, because of
> distortion "ch", "sh", "cfh", etc (add your preferred glyph-set here).
>
> And as for verbose cipher candidate pairs (like "qo", "ee", "dy", "ol",
> "or", to name but five), these appear so frequently that, if the VMs *is*
a
> cipher, then many of our most cherished statistical insights (as to letter
> adjacency, letter frequency, apparent vowels/consonants, word length, etc)
> may be largely worthless.
>
> Unfortunately, the "why-not-use-EVA" (ie "the-map-is-the-territory")
> assumption is being actively used by a number of people (most notably
Jeff,
> but I suspect others as well), which (I'm afraid) probably only serves to
> add noise to the overall signal here. :-(
>
> Of course, any statistical analysis of the VMs' text should detail the
> exact transcription and glyph-set used for pre-processing (for
> reproducibility), as this is a key modelling assumption - but this
> important step occasionally gets overlooked in the excitement. :-(

If people don't know by now that I use EVA then they ain't listening. :-)

BTW Nick would the peaks in the triplet method help in identifying where
abbreviations might occur. I am also willing to run tests with any
transcription method you choose.

Jeff

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


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