Re: VMs: shorthands

["Jeff" <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Gabriel Landini" <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 29 January 2004 16:27


> On Thursday 29 January 2004 15:22, Nick Pelling wrote:
> > I've already looked at a large number of shorthand histories (both in
the
> > BL and in other libraries with shorthand collections)
>
> Assuming that the vms is not nonsense, the problem with shorthands alone
> (despite that the words are short already and many vms characters look
like
> latin abbreviations) is that the entropy of the corpus should be
*increased*
> rather than what is observed (a decrecrease).
>

This I agree with! However there is still a chance abbreviations were used.
Oh my word I'm
defending Nick. I must check my temperarture. But there could still be
abbreviations no less.

> An entropy increase back to the level of other non-abbreviated languages
does
> not take place only through agglomeration of some characters (e.g. iin ->
m)
> because the results in Curva and Gava alphabets (that do precisely this)
> still show too low entropy. (
http://web.bham.ac.uk/G.Landini/evmt/commas.htm
> at the bottom of the page).
>
> So where is the missing information?
> I see two further possibilities:
>

I am on the case on this point!

> a) It has been lost: the encoding is lossy (e.g. one character can replace
> several possible strings). This would reduce the lexicon somehow, but I
can't
> imagine how to estimate this.
>

No it isn't lost I know that much already.

> or
>
> b) There is further information that we have not been able to account for.

BINGO! You got it!

> For instance same-looking characters may be position dependent (what I
mentioned
> the other day, starting and ending <y> may stand for different
abbreviations,
> <o> is different from the <o> in <qo>,  Strong/Glen <sh> plumes, and so
on.
> If that was the case, the text would "appear" to have low entropy when it
does
> not.
>

Wow I say Gabriel you have hit a few bulls eyes here. Heck I'm only just 25
miles away from where
you are I might pop up sometime.

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

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