Re: VMs: vms sentences

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Mark,

At 16:41 04/02/2004 +0000, Mark Lee wrote:
> Does anybody have any opinions on sentence breaks in the VMS? (A strong
> assumption would be one sentence per line)

AFAICR, there are only a few places in the VMs which appear to have some 
kind of structure between a line and a paragraph (which I presume is what 
you're interested in).

For example, f81r (the 'poem' page) seems to be 'ragged right' justified, 
which might indicate that these are separate lines of a poem or sentences.

The recipe section is mainly filled with 2-3 line short paragraphs, which 
would seem likely to be a single idea each (hence the identification with 
recipes - though recipes for what is another matter). :-)

There are also "title" fragments, which are short fragments of 
(centre-justified or right-justified) text, which you might consider 
(didn't someone collect all these together onto a web-page?): and there 
also some "long labels", most notably in the balneological section (IIRC).

Also: you've probably read about the evidence for some line-related 
structure (certain characters often appear at the end of a line, like EVA 
<m>). If the VMs is in cipher, then this might be re-using a rare character 
(like "x") to indicate a hyphen... though opinions differ. It's a 
reasonable conjecture, so you might consider parsing a line-terminal "-x" 
as a hyphen... you never know.

Finally: if the VMs is in some kind of artificial language (as a number of 
people think), then there should be good reason for some kind of structure 
to emerge from this kind of analysis. However, I'm not even sure that we 
know what comprises individual letters here - and this runs the risk of 
blurring many (otherwise soundly based) analyses. It may well be that you 
get significantly different results for different groupings of the 
character set (please *don't* use EVA on its own and expect to get sensible 
results), which might prove very interesting! :-)

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


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