Re: VMs: What are Neal keys

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A little devil's advocacy follows.  It's a bad habit for which I apologize
in advance.  I am actually grateful for the discussion of "Neal keys"
(pace Neal).  Maybe Neal sequences would be a bit safer?

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Nick Pelling wrote:
> As I mentioned, Philip also pointed out to me that many are accompanied by
> a second (matching) gallows a little further along the top line: ...

One might also ponder the possibility of some structure like, "I begin
this page with a view to discussing *some topic.*," where * is a gallows
form.  There are a number of kinds of linguistic constructions that can
involve bracketing and/or repeated words - repeated at a distance, that
is.  I admit that typically these forms are longer that a letter or
syllable.

A typical bracketing construction is a negative (French, formerly English,
several Siouan languages, etc.), e.g., ne + X + pas (or point, etc.).  In
Omaha-Ponca two other such constructions are schematically FINALLY + X +
FUTURE 'beware lest you X, be careful not to X' (with a second person
verb) and PERHAPS + X + I-HOPE 'Would that X', e.g., eskana dhathi
kkaNbdhegaN 'I hope you will come here' or 'ojala que vengas' (I hope this
Spanish is correct!).

Most Siouan languages also have a sort of highlighted quotation
construction that has the general form 'he-said-that-distal quotation
he-said-that-aforesaid' using two different verbs of saying (always
compounded with demonstratives in Siouan).  The quoting verbs are
typically one to two syllables long, e.g., Omaha-Ponca 'ga ... ai'.  Most
quotations in a text will lack the initial verb, which is the highlighting
mechanism.

A common repeated word constuction is 'either ...  or ...' with the same
word for 'either' and 'or', as in Spanish ('o ... o ...') or formerly in
English ('or ... or ...').  These are perhaps more useful in the immediate
context.

I should emphasize that I do not claim or expect that the contents of the
texts involve American languages.  I just happen to remember more canned
examples from American languages.

> I think that if you accept that these anomalous gallows patterns do
> indicate some recurrent pattern greater than a single word within the whole
> text, then you almost automatically have to rule out hoax hypotheses

Suppose the hoaxer created pseudo-keys?  We already know that if it's a
hoax it's a very elaborate one.  A bit more elaboration isn't
inconceivable, though figuring out the dimensions of a hoax and the
mechanisms behind it seems nearly as much work as decipherment.  It does
have the advantage that the proof is potentially less demanding, and the
simultaneous disadvantage that it is less satisfying.

I wonder - if the text was generated with Cardan grills, might it be
possible to compute a suitable set of grills?

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