Re: VMs: Re: Transcription Ramble

[elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Zitat von illumin8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> GC,
> 
> Minus your completely inappropriate political views (true or false) in
> THIS venue, I whole-heartedly agree with the following snippets:
> 

> > ...
> > Which comes closer to what you see in the VMS, at
> > least in ASCII - <daiin> or {8am}?

Well, does it matter?

We have no idea about the true _phonetic_ value of the glyphs anyway, so which
latin letter we assign to any glyph is arbitrary.

If we try to match the shapes, that's arbitrary just the same -- simply take the
gallows, which don't readily resemble current latin letters.

The good thing about EVA is IMHO, that it breaks down the VM script into the
smallest reasonably identifiable units.

"m" already contains the interpretation, that <iin> is to be treated as _one_
glyph, not two or three. But what are you going to do if you find out that this
isn't so? In EVA, its trivial to compose several elements to a glyph to
acommodate to any such finds, whereas in other transcription systems it's not so
easy to _de_compose them.

I prefer EVA for it's unbiasdness (goodness, there must be a better word for
it!), and for the fact that it keeps the loss of information to a minimum. You
shouldn't put your own interpretation into the definition of a transcription
scheme...

> > ...
> I've tried to have the, "What is a character?" argument but no one seems
> to care. They'd rather argue about entropy's h1 & h2. ... 

Oh, I'm always game for a "what's a character" argument. (Honestly, I think this
is way more interesting and perhaps even revealing than the current thread about
quire rebinding... ;-) It's my gut feeling that the VM alphabet is actually very
small (like 14 characters or so), but I couldn't find a proper encoding scheme
yet...

And don't put entropy discussions down: If all you've got is a hammer,
everything looks like a nail -- if you're good at one profession, then you'll
clearly try to employ this knowledge to solve the problem at hand. (As is
exemplified by the different approaches people on this list take. ;-) The
various aspects contribute to the puzzle, and, hey, at the very least I brushed
up my knowledge on entroy that way!

Cheerio,

   Elmar

P.S.: As for the question, "Why hasn't the EVA been modified to reflect current
new findings?", I guess a) there are none (undisputed finds, that is), and b) if
you've got several versions of EVA or any other transcription system floating
around, you already defeat the purpose of having a universal means of
communication...

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