09-03-2026, 12:58 AM
(08-03-2026, 10:53 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Even as it is inconsistent, I would treat e
as a single unit of writing. This means that ee and eee are not units of writing (but they may be units of meaning, or even only parts of units of meaning).
As you know, I have a different idea of what is the "true alphabet". But I have no good arguments for why my view is better than anyone else's.
In fact I think this is an impossible quest. Look at the spelling systems of almost any European language. There are always letters or digraphs that may have two or more different sounds -- like "th" in English, "ch" in German, etc. There are letters that work on their own and also as part of digraphs or trigraphs: someone who does not know German would never guess that "sch" is not an "s" followed by a "ch". In Portuguese "x" can have four different sounds, and the letters "que" may be pronounced "ke", "kwe", or "ki". And the parsing into letters or digraphs may be ambiguous: compare "pothead" and "apothem", "scendere" and "scalare"...
I gather that English has 12 vowel sounds. Italian has at least seven. Both languages are written with only five letters, without diacritics, thus some of these stand for multiple sounds -- and the script offers no clue as to which is which.
I don't think Martian linguists could figure out the "true" alphabet of any European language by studying only the written language. Not even for languages with a relatively phonetic spelling, like Italian or Spanish.
Moreover, there is evidence that our transcriptions of the VMS have a significant percentage of errors, from several different sources. I would guess at least one error per line, on good pages. Are Ih and ITh distinct from Ch and CTh, or just "quillos" by the Scribe? We won't know until we can read the text...
All the best, --stolfi