Re: VMs: Stroke harmony. Was: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Pamela Richards <spirlhelix@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Dennis


I realize there are probably only a handful of
astrologers on the list, but to further complicate
matters, we use "glyph" to mean a single character
that stands for a planet or other astrological
feature.

Good to be aware of it!

Warmly,

Pam


--- "Dennis S." <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Jacques Guy 
> 
> >>But not always - right?  I see a fair number of ae
> sequences.
> >
> >I just had a look and found 14 occurrences of <ae>
> but 6666
> >(wow! that's a worry!) of <ai>
> >
> >No. The gallows and <o> do seem to be "harmony
> neutral".
> >You will observe similar properties in real
> languages which
> >have vowel harmony, Finnish for instance, where e
> and i are
> >"harmony neutral". 
> 
> But is this the same thing?  Each vowel is a
> distinct phoneme, whether it is front or back. 
> Strokes can often stand by themselves.  I'm not sure
> the concepts are analogous. 
> 
> Too, strokes may not affect meaning.  The ff
> ligature in current Latin typography doesn't, nor do
> the gallows embellishments we have found in medieval
> Ms, so far as I can tell.  
> 
> Are Chinese and Arabic scripts relevant here? 
> Chinese characters are conventionally analyzed into
> strokes for classification.  Arabic characters take
> on different forms depending on position within
> words.  
> 
> >The terminology (glyph, grapheme and so on) leaves
> >to be desired. Add to that that the Russians (in
> Rongorongo
> >studies and, I believe, in Mayan studies too) use
> "grafem" 
> >for graph, or glyph, or grapheme, and that the
> French have 
> >followed the Russian usage, and you have a complete
> mess.
> 
> So in French "graphe`me" may mean either graph,
> glyph, or grapheme?
> 
> >To communicate without confusion you have to
> redefine 
> >everything every time. 
> 
> I thought "grapheme" was the analogue of "phoneme",
> a set of marks on a writing surface that constitute
> a meaningful unit; "graph" was a single instance of
> a grapheme; "allograph" was an alternative form of a
> grapheme, as B for b .  I'm not sure about "glyph". 
> Babs said it was the epigrapher's analogue for
> "grapheme".  
> 
> > That is one of reasons which
> >made me write, in my review of Kennedy and
> Churchill's
> >"The Voynich Manuscript" that "without a guiding
> methodology, 
> >which we lack, which we need to develop, its study
> leads 
> >only to follies worthy of Newbold's." Graphs,
> graphemes,
> >and so on, are only one very small part of the
> general
> >mess.
> 
> Yes. I've finally realized something. 
> Cryptographers treat the VMs like a cipher. 
> Linguists approach it as a language.  Epigraphers
> and other students of writing are applying their own
> concepts. However, we have something which doesn't
> really follow the rules of any of the disciplines,
> so we need a methodology which is a superset of all
> of them.
> 
> Dennis
>
______________________________________________________________________
> To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx
> with a body saying:
> unsubscribe vms-list
> 


=====
"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list