RE: VMs: Short string

["Brian Tawney" <btawney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I remove 'q' and I get 'zvpschotskfhleeeodayiiiixrngmly'
>which does not exist.

Of course you can come up with a word that doesn't exist...there are 2^31
possible strings that can be constructed this way, and the manuscript only
contains some thousands of distinct strings.

>Now, let me have a go:

>szchbdfgjklmnpqrtwyxiuaeong

>Does anyone think there is any significance to the fact that you
>can form about 100% of the words in Chinese by removing
>letters from that string?

You need to add a second "i" somewhere after the "e" to get 100% of the
words...as is, your string doesn't handle words that end
in -ui, -uai, -ei, -ai.

There is absolutely significance to the fact that you can form close to 100%
of Mandarin words from this string:  Mandarin words have a structure that is
reflected in the string.  You've got all of the initial sequences up at the
beginning, the vowels towards the middle, and the finals at the end.  You
could do the same thing with other non-European languages like Tibetan,
Vietnamese, Cantonese, etc.  Longer strings could get you languages like
Hebrew and Arabic.  It would take a much longer string (I think) to do the
same thing with Sanskrit or Latin.

Languages like Latin, French and Italian, which seem more likely to be the
plaintext language of the manuscript (if it has a plaintext language) aren't
bound by the same phonological rules as Mandarin, so I would think it would
be challenging to come up with a similar string for one of those
languages...but I wouldn't be surprised if it could be done.

I'm not defending a position here, I'm just asking a question, which I feel
sure has been asked before.  My apologies if I have offended in some way.

Brian Tawney



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