(30-03-2019, 07:02 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A few points:- We have to be careful that "natural language" doesn't exclude some kind of artificial language or engineered language. It's perfectly possible (however unlikely) that we're dealing with something which is linguistic but not natural. Assuming any such language is intended to be used and spoken, it shouldn't make a difference to how we generally approach the text. The problem comes when we select a candidate language to fit the text, as no such candidate really exists.
Can you give an example of something which would be linguistic but not natural? Would it be like languages in fiction? Newspeak or Nadsat, or would it have to be something completely removed from a recognizeable language, like Klingon?
I am not clear on the differences between artificial, engineered, and constructed, are they the same?
Quote:- We can say that the text "looks like a language", but the question is to whom? We know it looks similar to a language, but we can also see some differences or mismatches. For somebody in the early 1400s, what would a language look like? I guess they would be more easily fooled and less capable of performing a more indepth study of the text.
It would seem like those in the 1600s at least thought it was different enough to be Egyptian hieroglyphs or Glagolitic script, although i would have thought they would see the similarities that we see all the better, being closer in time. Maybe they didnt really look? Blocked by the bits they didnt recognize? It would be a shorter task to ask others than to do the work?
Quote:- This leads us to the question of what a person in the early 1400s would do in order to deceive his contemporaries. The text is complex, it is patterned, it displays relationships between glyphs, between words and the page, which nobody would have been able to fully explore in the creator's lifetime. These could have been added to deceive, but clearly the creator would have put in more effort than was needed, which leads us to question whether we have the correct explanation.
It kind of depends on who wrote it and why. Is it a product of an affected mind? It might not be considered effort, per se, if one had ocd, for instance, which manifested in a need to write and/or draw or paint in this manner, whether or not it has meaning.
It seems like it is the reverse of those p vs np situations, Unsolved problem in computer science: If the solution to a problem is easy to check for correctness, must the problem be easy to solve? we are at a stage where the problem is not solved and possible solutions are not easy to check for correctness, so must the problem be difficult to solve? Or are we just lacking the key. If the creator had passed along his trick, if there had been an instruction sheet stapled to it, might it have been quickly solvable? (Even if the trick was that it has no meaning, if we knew that, it would be solved.)
Quote:- However, the whole idea of "deception" is rather solipsistic. It privileges our negative knowledge as a positive fact: we don't understand the text and therefore the text is "not understandable". To us, yes, but as a fact of the text? Nope.
Can a solipsist accuse someone else of deception?
But i agree, that is why i added the option that it may just be a factor of how the construction works.
Is that the only reason a number of us seem to mention deception or obfuscation, though? The not knowing? There are several instances where the imagery seems intentionally reversed or misplaced in comparison to my perceived reference, just enough that it cannot be clearly seen to align with it, and yet it does not feel like i am trying to fool myself into making it fit because i want it to, it feels like they moved things around for reasons beyond the perceived obfuscation that resulted due to the positional changes. Some may not be changes at all, they may simply have been placing each element randomly on the page rather than attempting to align them positionally, possibly because of having only piecemeal examples, so it could be wrong assumptions about why it is out of place. But some of it seems like commentary on mistakes or misinterpretations of similar references, in that they too have analogous traits of wrongness.
That is why i think the history of each glyph should be carefully considered, especially any that are known to have caused errors of transcription in the past, ie before 1400ish. They may stand for the error, rather than for what they themselves are known to stand for. Like how sloppy t can look like 4, or r rotunda can look like 2 or z.