RE: Evolution - was VMs: Inks and retouching

["John Grove" <4groves@xxxxxxxxx>]

	Gabriel,

	Thanks for the character counts. You reminded me of the one 'major' problem
I have with a natural language solution: lack of double letters or double
syllables. They are far too rare in the VMS. John Koontz, this is one thing
you're going to have to try and figure out with a syllabic substitution -
any human language has consecutively repeated syllables or written
characters within a word (hope Jacques doesn't have any examples of
languages that don't). The VMS lacks this very common pattern. It is
possible that as in Arabic, where a shaddah? marks a double character, that
the VMS has a marker or something to indicate duplicate syllables...

	ydarai 'rh' y (rh's haven't been given fair treatment in our earlier
transliterations).

in 6058
an 119
on 9
en 7
_n 4
*n 2
	Okay, so... 'n' is preceded by 'i' or 'a' with only 9 times where it is
preceded by an 'o'. The 7 'en' should be investigated a little closer to see
if they are 'eb' or 'u'.

	Rene, you are right that there is evidence that could be interpreted by any
theory as reasonable exceptions to rules, possible errata, or foreign words
represented in the text which don't follow the rules. The Cardan grille
isn't any worse a theory than any other if you could find one that actually
produces something intelligent.

	John.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Rene Zandbergen
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 7:24 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Evolution - was VMs: Inks and retouching


On Sunday 01 August 2004 22:07, John Grove wrote:

> Now, although there are a couple of stand-alone
> 'i' endings without a formal end-stroke, I'm
> willing for now to consider that an 'i' does not
> exist by itself.

I hate to say it :-) but one could imagine that
someone using a Cardan grille did not have the
hole in the card properly aligned with the
underlying table, and only copied the -i
where it should have read -iin.

What does that mean:

1) We can speculate and come up with loads of
   different explanations. Any single piece of
   speculation does not help to favour one theory
   over another. To a supporter of the Cardan grille
   hypothesis, the above must sound pretty
   reasonable and could be used as supporting
   evidence.

2) When an observation doesn't seem to fit any
   standard behaviour, it is still possible that:
   - it's a mistake by the author
   - our model of the behaviour is not complete
   - it's not meant to fit the behaviour

Examples of that last bullet are left as an
exercise to the reader :-)

Cheers, Rene




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