[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: VMs: MS408 Character Development

Koontz John E wrote:

	I'm glad you brought this up!  D'Imperio noted how most of
the characters may be formed from just /i/ and /e/ strokes.


This general phenomenon is the source of the frequent hypothesis that the
script might encode one set of letters, probably consonants, with
sequences like i, ii, iii, ..., c, cc, ccc, ... (c = EVA e).  In such an
approach one probably has to assume that other elements like a or o
combine with these sequences to provide additional combinations.  Many of
the other characters which tend to occur between such sequences (or
finally) seem to consist of i or c plus some "flourish" element, e.g., EVA
m = i + flourish, or d = c + rather similar flourish.  These might simply
be the last i or c in a sequence plus a different kind of stroke element,
probably representing a vowel.

Yes. You had just mentioned this to me. The idea seems to be that this would form a cipher, with the number of i's and/or c's forming Roman-like numerals. However, I think that what Maurizio said, that this phenomenon is simply characteristic of the writing style of the era that had just ended, provides a much more parsimonious explanation.

This approach as such doesn't account for the gallows set or the
horizontal bar that links some letters, especially ch (c-bar-c).

I would maintain that any analysis performed on the EVA text should also
be repeated on the EVA text resolved into something "simpler" along these
lines.

That is, instead of

f  a ch  y  s    y  k  a l  a r    a t  a ii n  Sh   o l    ...
1f a c-c cy cs . cy 1k a il a ir . a 2k a ii in cs-c o il . ...

Here I'm coding the "flourishes" with the EVA encoding I've extracted them
from and using 1 and 2 for the two kinds of initial gallows stroke, k and
f for the two kinds of gallows termination, and dash for the horizontal
bar.

It might be interesting. Along with that, it might be well to do something similar on a known text, in a known script, as a control.

I do think that we make too much of the difficulties of EVA. You can use BITRANS to change EVA into anything you like, in most cases without losing any significant information. An obvious example: EVA -iin in most cases should be a single glyph, but just use BITRANS to change it into Currier -M .

I certainly don't think we can just ignore the connections between the strokes, as EVA sometimes seems to imply. Often, though, the connections are obvious.

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