|
Well null insertion would have to follow some structure to
maintain the various VMS features. I think your idea has a lot of merit. If you
find the right set of null placement criteria the numbers and letters idea might
fly. You must however also explain the shortening of words towards ends of
lines. I had a similar idea a while back thinking of certain consonants and
vowels forcing word breaks. I did not have the numbers idea you had. One
suggested method for word endings would be to finish of the word with set number
sequences after the termination character. Such as 123, 32, 345 etc. A small
group of such numbers when encoded would produce the word ending repetitions. As
EVA n can only usually end a word (thinking of the word starting iiinch, which
might or might not be a scribal error) as well as m, these could be different
because they represent numerics. If you also occasionally replaced the letter i
with digit 1 just to confuse you could introduce glyphs that rarely appeared
elsewhere in a word.
Jeff
----- Original Message -----
Sent: 01 April 2004 04:44
Subject: Re: VMs: Folio and Quire
numbers
Jeff wrote:
What rules to you suppose were used to determine null
insertion? If word ending rules were strict then nulls would need a similar
ruleset. Also which units do you see as null? I only see candidates for a
verbose structure. The placement of characters adheres to too rigid a
structure to allow the scribe any latitude. In the
approach I was thinking of, there is no need to have any rules for null
insertion - since they are different characters, you could put them wherever
you want, and the reader can just delete them.
To give a simple
example, let's represent the VM characters used for text by letters and those
used as nulls by numbers.Also, let us decide that the characters represented
by vowels should be followed by a space. Then, given the text:
OMNES
GALLIA DIVISA EST IN PARTIBUS TRES
a scribe might insert the nulls
(randomly) and spaces as follows:
O M4NE S7GA
L8LI A D82I 3VI S9A E ST6I
NP8A RTI 5BU ST8RE S...
A reader familiar with
Latin would have no problem removing the nulls and redividing the words
correctly.
The comment about "word ending rules" was just a way to
account for the fact some letters are more common as finals than others. There
is no requirement that the rules be absolute; they could just be suggestions,
often but not always followed.
Bruce
|