I remember Takahashi writing that sometimes he doubted whether there was a difference between o and a at all (in certain contexts?).
Anyway, these kind of illustrate my point. There is a clear difference in context between EVA o and a. These contexts roughly correspond to one of the two forms. So even when many utterances are imperfect, we still end up assigning them to different characters.
Without such discerning contexts, there's only the madness of the continuum.
(22-04-2025, 06:36 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a clear difference in context between EVA o and a.
I don't think so. The pairs or , ar , ol , al are all frequent, and it is also here that the continuum exists.
o is less frequent before i, but this occurs.
a is less frequent before k, t but this also occurs.
Just a thought. I was looking at Aga's post (#28) about the varied gallows characters --- instead of being "sloppy" writing, it could be a way to incorporate a past or present "tense" or a pronoun into a given word. For example, instead of "I" see, "we" see or "they" see, it would be the root (see) modified by the gallows.
(22-04-2025, 07:31 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't think so. The pairs or , ar , ol , al are all frequent, and it is also here that the continuum exists.
o is less frequent before i, but this occurs.
a is less frequent before k, t but this also occurs.
The contexts don't have to be exclusive. The frequency of aiin, ok, cho.. all point to a meaningful distinction between a and o. That's leaving qo out of the equation.
Maybe a and o are contextually "nudged" variants of the same?
a and y have already been hypothesized to be related if not possibly variants of one another, and though a ≠ o most of the time, there are some instances where the scribe(s) writes a half-assed y ( ˆ ) instead of an o. Maybe yk ≈ ok in some way as well? Also, just as we have qo we have (admittedly few) qy, further suggesting that even if not directly related, at least both vowels would sometimes get mixed up by the scribe(s)
(22-04-2025, 08:15 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The frequency of aiin, ok, cho.. all point to a meaningful distinction between a and o.
I do agree with that, but I am not absolutely certain of it...
There is some overlap between the contexts of
o,
a and
y, but the context cannot help in deciding which character is written, in case it is unclear.
a and
o have sufficiently similar shapes to allow intermediate forms and uncertain cases. Since the writing of these characters is occasionally careless, one could begin to suspect that it does not even matter.
That
ai is much more frequent than
oi may be because it 'looks better' or is more natural to write. But of course we don't know.
y has a very distinctive tail, and is never confused with
a or
o (but sometimes with
q or
l).
On the other hand, there are quite a number of words ending in -
o, in places where -
y would be more expected.
Such an
o can essentially always be replaced by a
y, and result in a valid, more frequent word.
We cannot judge if they are equivalent, or this is a signficant difference. To be on the safe side, we need to assume they are not the same.
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attachment=10404]
That's just one of the problems.
So is the difference in spelling (already mentioned).
Here is an example (Latin) from an exercise at the University of Zurich.
Red: Middle Ages, blue: modern times. This change took place around 1400.
Even the idea that the scribes used both spellings, depending on their training, reveals the problem. I don't even want to think about regional differences.
So I wonder if a normal AI can help me at all.
I use Google. Why? It's the 1.5 million comparison sentences that also come from old books and not just from today's textbooks.
The disadvantage is that I have to have already looked up the words in the dictionary before I enter them. Just to see if the meaning changes too much, or if it's just nonsense.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
(23-04-2025, 08:23 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Red: Middle Ages, blue: modern times. This change took place around 1400.
True, but more progressively: spellings were updated very slowly during the 15th century and even later during the 16th century you could still find many medieval spellings in books. The most common changes being e -> ae/oe and ci -> ti, others like mpn -> mn were much less frequent.
It's possible but unusual to find both spellings of the same Latin word in the same book: spelling was a lot more consistent in Latin than in (most?) vernacular languages.
Two reasons why the statistical impact of these changes was negligible as early as the 1420s-1430s in most Latin manuscripts.
(22-04-2025, 03:32 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Writing a text with the mouse is the wrong prerequisite. No matter how hard I try with the mouse, it always looks like shit.
You should do it by hand directly on paper.
The result is the same. I tried it.
I'll maybe provide the actual photo in a few minutes
I used the song lyric otolal qokeedy dobro pozalovach from a song I once made but didn't finish, that mixes up random words from the VM with gibberish and some real words that exist in other languages.