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

["Dan Gibson/CanBooks" <dangibson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm please that there are others on the list that are aquatinted with
Arabic. I am not an Arabist, although I should be. My family and I have
spent the over fifteen years living in the Middle East, (everything from the
Empty Quarter to Yemen to the Cities of the Levant to living among the
Bedouin). My wife is probably the Arabist of the family. She enjoys reading
the great Arab writers, where I enjoyed discovering about the ancient Arab
civilizations. That brings us to the older dialects of Arabic, such as
Thamudic, Safaitic and Nabataean. Just for your interest these early
dialects of Arabic had less letters in them. So words with sounds today,
like the Kh or X sound, (khamsi = five) were written with a heavy H.

These languages did not use the flowing text that is known as Arabic today,
but rather used more blocky text. See http://nabataea.net/writingch.html

The problem with comparing the VM with these languages, is that we do not
have any large blocks of script in these languages. All that has survived
are inscriptions that are only a few lines long. Thus, we need to collect
many pieces of graffiti in order to come up with a frequency table, let
alone a dictionary of words. Fortunately there are over 20,000 inscriptions,
but they are only now being collected and cataloged. The second problem is
time. I wouldn't mind tackling this problem, but my time is claimed, and I
sometimes wonder how I will get everything done that I need to get done, let
alone tackle the VM. The third problem is, that until someone comes up with
a convincing argument that the VM is actually a cipher of an ancient
language, the scholars of those languages won't be interested in tackling
the VM.

Dan


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