Re: VMs: question from Adrian

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 adrian@xxxxxx wrote:
> i would like to ask you if anyone has attempted to further decipher VMS
> based on my idea that it is just a font lost in time and that it is a
> phonetic transcription of one or more European languages?

That's a reasonable question.

The possibility - one might almost say the certainty - that we don't
understand precisely what the basic character entities are - how to to
draw the line between them - complicates matters.  But I think that the
extensive distributional analysis of analysis into characters inherent in
the EVA transcription suggests that the answer in that case is
definitely no.

I've looked at some alternative ways of chopping things up in characters
or syllables.  I haven't done any distributional analysis of the results,
but so far they haven't helped much along those lines.  Specifically, I
don't think the raw counts of entities under any approaches I've thought
of so far are particularly encouraging, even without real cryptological
(or text-o-logical?) analysis.  I think others have been down this road
already, too, anyway, without discovering anything.

I will say this about cutting things up a bit differently.  I suspect it
inverts the statistical analysis of what's a consonant and what's a vowel.
And the results certainly don't look any worse.  Word lengths change quite
a bit.

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