Re: VMs: Phonetic VMS?

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

3/03/2005 7:14:06 PM, Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:

>I guess Jacques' work with the Easter Island Rongo-Rongo 
materials
>provides a good parallel.  There is a way to read these by 
pronouncing
>aloud names for the little figures in Rapanuian

Or for a better example, there is an almost completely 
standardized 
way of "spelling out" Chinese characters in Chinese. 

The character for "copper" for instance becomes "golden side, 
comrades' 
togetherness". "Golden side" describes the classifier for metal, 
pronounced 
"jin" and meaning "gold" in the absolute sense, the metal "par 
excellence", 
which is written on the side of "copper". 

To its right is a character that gives the pronunciation: tong2. 
It also happens to mean "with, together". But they are so many 
characters 
pronounced "tong2" that you need to specify which it is by 
saying for instance
"tong2zhi4 de tong2", i.e. the tong2 of tong2zhi4 ("comrade").

Whence "golden side, comrades' togetherness" which has
nothing at all to do with "copper".


>My best guess would be that if deciphered it would sound like 
some
>European written language from the 1400s to early 1600s, 
probably Latin as
>pronounced in some corner of Europe in that period.

My best guess is: I have absolutely no idea.




______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list