Re: VMs: VMS EVA ii combinations

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

[Jeff]:

> >daiidy, skaiiodar, daiim and cphodaiils.

[Frogguy]:

> So they are hapax legomena. In such a long text,
> with such a small alphabet, yes, any hapax
> legomenon is likely to be a scribal mistake. 

My interpretation:

daiidy       seems just about allowable.
skaiiodar    not
daiim        is a good VMs word
cphodaiils   is odd, but valid

The first word could be a contraction of two
(or a scribal mistake). The second one, if the
scribe was not drunk, it may have been a foreign
word which he just 'transcribed phonetically'. 

I don't know anything about hapax legomena,
but if one were to search the VMs mailing list
in a couple of years, this sequence would stand
out as not occurring for more than ten years,
then suddenly to appear in the corpus a few times
in a row, then to (perhaps) disappear again.

This sort of thing also happens in the VMs.

Is it a sign of meaningful content?

Cheers, Rene


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing.
http://photos.yahoo.com/
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list