Hi Nick,
What I was trying to get at was that the spaces may not be critical for understanding the text, inthesamewa y thatyoucanr ead this quite easily. The text itself is very structured, and the spaces on the whole fit into that structure - or rather they make that structure more apparent. Maybe that was the purpose of them. I suspect that the text could have been read without spaces, but that they help to act as a reference point in the decoding process.
But that's just my theory - I have no proof of course!
Cheers,
Jon.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nick Pelling [mailto:incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 26 May 2004 16:12
> To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: VMs: Spaces
> Importance: Low
>
>
> Hi Jon,
>
> At 15:54 26/05/2004 +0100, Jon Grove wrote:
> >It seems to me that the structure of VMS 'words' (i.e. the
> characters
> >between the spaces) clearly indicates that the spaces mean
> something and
> >are not sprinkled in at random. The fact that there are
> places where the
> >spaces seem to be 'out by one' suggests to me that the rule
> for inserting
> >a space was not necessarily straightforward, and that
> sometimes the scribe
> >forgot, or got it wrong.
>
> The more structured space occurrences are, the more
> predictable they are:
> and hence the less meaning (or rather the, less information)
> they contain.
> Correspondingly, the more structured the majority use of space is, so
> minority use of spaces become more worthy of study - what is
> happening in
> split ol pairs and half-spaces? Are there any other space
> instances which
> appear similarly puzzling?
>
> Ultimately, invoking "scribal error" is a bit of a cop-out:
> there are very
> few obvious corrections in the whole VMs, and I don't think
> the text itself
> doesn't give the impression of having being written in undue
> haste - the
> hand(s) are clear, the letters are (for the most part)
> legible, etc. All in
> all, I feel reasonably confident that the VMs appears much as its
> originator(s) intended it to.
>
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
>
>
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