VMs: Half spaces ...

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Nick Pelling <nickpelling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Note that most pairs on this list produce far more
> plausible "forward" than 
> "reverse" Voynichese words - ie "araiin" looks good,
> but "aiinar" looks 
> bad. This suggests to me that half-spaces might well
> have been transcribed 
> as full-spaces in the transcription used here (which
> was it, BTW?) - EVA 
> currently allows for no such distinction, though GC
> does use "-" for half-spaces in his.

It is not so much a question of the transcription
alphabet but rather the annotation rules.
If I am not mistaken, already the earliest
voylist modifications of Currier's file used
a dot for a space, and a comma if the transcriber
was in doubt whether there was a space or not.
This has been taken over in Stolfi's interlinear
(coming from Gabriel's earlier interlinear).
The need to identify 'uncertain spaces' becomes
more clear when there are several people transcribing
the same text, and one of them decides that there
is a space and the other doesn't. ALso, an individual
transcriber may be unsure about spaces. Anyone who
has spent some time transcribing knows what this is
like.

Now, since the concept of half spaces having some
special meaning is not a standard thing,
I would like to see some evidence that they actually
exist in the Voynich MS. If so, instead of having
one boundary (space vs. no space) one has two:
space vs. half space and half space vs. no space.

In order to allow the existence of a 'certain 
half space' as opposed to an 'uncertain space',
I would expect to see that the frequency distribution
of inter-character spaces (suitably normalized)
has three maxima, not two.

Of course, there is no argument from my side about
the need to have a character (hyphen or comma)
for something a bit less than a normal word space.
Just about the fact that it was intended by the
author to have a special meaning.

Does handwritten (or printed) Arabic make a
distinction in the space width in case the space
is not a word space but an orthographic one?
If so, it could change the picture, but then
in the VMs one would expect half spaces to be
concentrated after specific characters.

Cheers, Rene 




	
		
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