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Re: VMs: half spaces / split words

Hi Marke,

Thanks for the extra numbers! :-)

At 10:23 19/08/2004 +0100, Marke Fincher wrote: 
A good number of the word pairs which occur mostly in the forward direction
also exist as a used word when concatenated.  (see list below).  As you say
this probably arises from uncertainty in transcription or alternatively a
deliberate attempt to break up words.

However, there is enough unique structure at the beginning of words to
believe that the majority of spaces are genuine meaningful separators
even if there are others that are mistakes or deliberate insertions.

Where very common glyph-pairs (like "ol") are split up - ("o l" & "ctho l" here) - this would seem to be consistent with either scribal error or deliberate hiding (but probably not with both). But where the counts of both split and unsplit versions are significant (like "ol chedy", 21 & 33, "ol shedy" 21 & 20), this seems to me to hint at something more systematic.

(o,l) f=7 r=1  (ol) occurs=528
(s,aiin) f=29 r=3  (saiin) occurs=115
(s,ar) f=9 r=1  (sar) occurs=75
(r,aiin) f=11 r=0  (raiin) occurs=61
(s,or) f=5 r=0  (sor) occurs=44
(ol,keedy) f=6 r=1  (olkeedy) occurs=40
(ctho,l) f=1 r=0  (cthol) occurs=58
(ol,keey) f=4 r=0  (olkeey) occurs=39
(cho,daiin) f=3 r=0  (chodaiin) occurs=38
(chod,aiin) f=1 r=0  (chodaiin) occurs=38
(ol,chedy) f=21 r=4  (olchedy) occurs=33
(or,aiin) f=52 r=6  (oraiin) occurs=32
(ol,shedy) f=21 r=7  (olshedy) occurs=20
(ar,al) f=24 r=7  (aral) occurs=13
(ar,aiin) f=22 r=3  (araiin) occurs=6

I should say that these extra numbers only heighten the mystery for me. Why should "ar al" be roughly twice as frequent as "aral", and similarly for "or aiin" and ar aiin"? If the "aiin" family constructs are (as Tiltman suspected) steganographic Roman numeral i's (in some way), then it would seem likely that other Roman numeral letters would be hidden nearby - so perhaps that is what we are looking at here, with "or" "ar" "ol" "al" etc.

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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