Re: VMs: Short string

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brian Tawney wrote:

> Does anyone think there is any significance to the
> fact that you can form
> about 62% of the words in the manuscript by
> removing letters from this string?

Yes, the idea and the comparison with Roman
numerals has been suggested in various
forms in the past, but nobody has yet been able
to come up with a _system_ that behaves like
the actual structure seen in VMs words.

Jacques Guy wrote:
 
> 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?

--- Elmar Vogt <elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx> responded:

> Well, the interesting part in Brian's observation is
> certainly that every 
> letter shows up only in one position in the string
> (though perhaps several 
> times), ie it's not necessary to rearrange the
> remaining letters. This may 
> be common for Asian languages, but certainly
> unexpected for Indoeuropean  tongues.

Yes, but this is also why Brian's string generates
62%, as you indicate.
In order to get 100%, one would have
to do exactly the same thing: characters like
Eva-y, r, l, d  can occur near the start and near
the end of words. In Thai, the only SE Asian
language I know, these could be (the sounds):
n, m, ng and 'stop'. 

While I've never expressed any too positive 
opinion about the "Chinese" hypothesis, the
argument of Jacques is the simplest argument
I've seen so far why it would be dangerous to
discard it simply as 'too exotic'.

Cheers, Rene


		
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