VMs: Evita

[knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello Nick,

Nick Pelling wrote (Thu, 12 Feb 2004 08:49:25 +0000)

Interesting - but can you please tell us (a) a little more about Evita

(which I assume is a programme, not a medium? :-o ), (b) which part of which transcription you used?

It might also be revealing (a) to try labels and paragraphs separately, or (b) to try different hands individually.

Yet... I personally find it strange that "ok" is considered to be a

composite letter but not "qo" or "dy" - or even "ot", for that matter.

"ai[i][i]n" also seems to cause some problems here. Curious... :-o

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

To familiarize myself with the text I thought I might try a sight scan line by line and page by page, neglecting labels. Then compare individual pages to larger sections with a small concordance program. Thanks for the caution about lumping the two hands.

At the cost of extending the alphabet, Evita should reduce eye and brain strain since, in many instances, one Evita character contains as much information as two in EVA.

The choice of letters I listed is tentative. There is no reason for separating out "q" and "y" other than the intuition that they are markers, there needs to be some limitation to the length of the alphabet, and I needed to move in some direction. I do believe gallows characters should stand alone for easy reference to EVA and just in case they might have special significance.

I wanted to display the extra "i" in "ai[i][i]n" but I agree that it could cause some problems. I think Evita letters should relate as well as possible to EVA. At the same time, I believe it should avoid being pronounceable so as not to influence an attempt to find what lies behind it. I think the letter "w" and the numeral "1" should not be used because of resemblance to "v" and "l" in some fonts. I am not committed to any particular scheme.

Evita proposes to be a parsimonious little sister to EVA. At the moment she/it is only a partial concept. With your knowledge of cryptology you will know whether it has merit and, if so, the best structure to give it.

Ciao .................. Knox

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