Re: VMs: VMS Re: to Dennis re: why French - Charrette Project similarities

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

27/03/2005 9:53:50 PM, Wayne Durden <wdurden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>The frame of reference I was coming from
>involves my experience with court reporters.  There are several forms of
>take down, and now in my locale the court reporters' machine instantly
>translates to plaintext for us on the fly.  In the period about 12 years
>ago, the court reporters used a miniTypewriter like machine that spit out a
>folding tape about 2 to 3 inches wide.

Stenotype is the name of the machine.

>I recall looking at the tape
>on one instance and not being able to make heads nor tails of it.

The tape advances as the keys are hit, so you have to read it
vertically. Not only that, but each letter is typed in its
own column, so it looks a bit like this:

   H
 E   
    L
    L 
       O
         W
       O
        R
    L
D


>The court
>reporter explained the take down was a method of phonetic short hand

Yes, the principles are those of shorthand, except that it is
"typed shorthand".


>I was thinking that this kind of take down would have the same information
>content as plaintext with fewer glyphs and to my amateur mind I was thinking
>this would be less entropic because there would be "less scattering".

On the contrary, there is more scattering in shorthand. Most shorthands
dispense with the vowels. This increases the uncertainty of "what is
going to turn up next?".

>on the whole similar sounds like "deau" and "teau" might be
>reduced to "do" in a phonetic takedown in a made up alphabet.  I admit I
>know little of this concept of the entropy in a text and was approaching it
>from a layman's standpoint for these ideas.

When, reading French, you come across "...ea" you have a very good chance 
of the next letter being "u". In German, and in Dutch, you can be 
pretty sure that the letter following "sc" is going to be "h", and so on.
This decreases the unpredictability and entropy = unpredictability.



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