Re: VMs: Thoughts about Roman numbers in the VMS

[elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Zitat von Jan <hurychj@xxxxxxxxx>:


> Hello,  
> 
> the "roman numeral" hypothesis has one plus: it would explain the "shortness"
> of VM "words". Well, 
> not entirely, what is the longest one (MDCCCLXXXVIII)?

That's for numbers <2000.

IIRC, currently there are about 8000 different groups identified in the VM, so
in straightforward Roman numberals, that'd go up to something like
MMMMMMMDCCCLXXXVIII. :-O

(I'm also not sure how old the use of "IV" instead of "IIII" is.)

> 
> However, we have more characters in the VM than there is basic Roman numerals
>  (I,V,X,L, etc..)
> Secondly, it would require the codebook of  - how many different "words" are
> in the VM? :-)

It must be an awful mess to sort 8000 index cards manually for your codebook...
but mind you that the details of the VM system definitely differ from Roman
numbering. (Otherwise we'd have more triplet glyphs than "e" and "i".)

> ...
> the VM script is definitely a set of ARTIFICIALLY invented characters  -
> quite different from naturally
> developed scripts - the intent being to make the characters simpler and
> organized in some logical system.

Couldn't you come up with similar mappings for the latin alphabet? "i", "n" and
"m" seem to be variations of each other, "f", "t" and "l" form a group, as do
"e", "c" and "o", and "b", "d" and "k"... ;-)

   Elmar

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