Re: VMs: RE: wet blacnket?/ (was that "blanket"?)

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

25/08/2004 9:41:20 AM, "Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


>For example, "Japanese" or "Hawaiian" words could be generated from a table
>of valid syllables, or "Chinese" words could be generated from a table of
>onsets and rhymes.

Or syllables. There are only 400 possible syllables in Mandarin.

>If you tuned your algorithm well enough a high
>percentage of the words you generate would be real words in your target
>language.

No. It depends on the language and on its structure. In Buin
for instance (a language of New Guinea) every word you may
coin has a very high chance of alreading existing. About 80%
as estimated by Donald Laycock. Not so in English.

In fact, the best illustration of all this is Lewis Carroll's 
"Jabberwock".

> Rugg has spent some time tuning his algorithm

Lewis Carroll tuned his "algorithm" to perfection. The result
looks and sounds like credible English. It follows, in
Rugg's line of argument, that Shakespeare's sonnets are
meaningless gibberish, a hoax, a slithy tove.

I cannot understand, for the life of me, why that
grotesque claim was not laughed out of court. It 
appears that it is not only that Rugg cannot string
two coherent thoughts together, but that the editors
of Cryptologia and Scientific American cannot tell
incoherent gibberish, which that is, when they see
it.



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