Re: VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

30/08/2004 9:01:07 PM, "Dan Gibson/CanBooks" <dangibson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>You of course assuming that the VM is written in classical Arabic

Only because that was the original poster's assumption.

> But consider what the Arabs call sun
>letters. 

And "moon letters". I know. They vary from dialect to dialect, too.

> shams "sun" becomes ishams

ish-shams, actually, and that looks like Egyptian to me.
But modern Egyptians still write it as 'lshms and, actually,
when you read out a text in Classical Arabic, you pronounce
it 'ash-shamsu, the lam is assimilated to the next consonant.

As I mentioned, there are dialectal differences. Thus
Classical Arabic 'al-kitabu is in Egyptian ik-kitab.

One's sun letter is the other's moon letter.

>It is also interesting to notice that before
>Muhammad made the dialect of the Quraish tribe the standard in Arabic


and his dialect lacked a glottal stop, hence the later use
of the hamzah to signify where a glottal stop should be
pronounced when there was none in the writing.

>Many
>of these Arabic dialects had NO definite article

That is news to me, but I will follow you there.
I am no specialist of Arabic.


>One must be very careful when dismissing certain languages as "ruling
>themselves out."

I see the Arabic I know, and the Hebrew, and the Akkadian, as
"ruling themselves out". 

>The problem
>with analyzing the VM is that the language that it was written/ciphered in
>may have changed significantly.

May? Almost certainly has.


>All languages grow and change.

Don't I ever know (*sigh*)

Do you know (rhetorical question) how to say 'four' in Sakao and
in the Shark-Bay language? One is "yeth" (using English-friendly
spelling) the other is "tharr". Both demonstrably come from the 
same word, "vati", still attested in most languages of Vanuatu
(where I did my PhD).

Well, closer to us, I could have used French 'o', which is
Italian 'akkwa', which is Romanian 'ab', all from Latin 'akwa'
(spelt aqua, of course).



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