03-10-2016, 06:04 PM
(03-10-2016, 03:17 PM)ThomasCoon Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And I still think my point about the script apparently being designed with cKh in mind is a strong indicator that it's meaningful.
That is an interesting observation. I think on your side, one thing which may be hard to prove is that the author didn't stumble upon the cKh combination after he began using script - there are many examples of signs ending up fitting together which were never intentionally designed to be (Mayan Hieroglyphs give many examples). I believe the VMS author designed the two signs separately and later realized he could fit them together if he elongated the ch a little.
When you look at the script as a whole, it's clear that the shapes of letters have been carefully chosen to reflect the way they are used to form words, so it seems much more likely that the cKh combination is also a result of this planning. What reason is there to think it was something that was devised after the script was created?
Quote:Either way, both of us seem to be arguing from observation and conjecture, and this is problematic. Without stone-cold numbers to support or deny what we see, we will continue to go in circles forever and the VMS will never be solved ("I think that [a] and [o] are the same" - "I think that [l] is a form of [y]" - "I think that [ch] and [k] weren't intentionally designed to make [ckh]").
We need statistics
I don't see how all the statistics in the world are going to make a difference to anything without some criteria for deciding what is evidence for the idea that these two combinations of glyphs are equivalent and what is evidence against it.
The way I look at it, if kch and cKh were functionally identical, and the only difference between the two were in the arbitrary choice of a scribe as to which one he felt like writing, then we should expect to find one form X% of the time and the other form (100-X)% of the time regardless of context. Instead we find a much more complex pattern than that, which indicates that the difference is meaningful.
Anyway, the default assumption should of course be that any clear-cut distinction is meaningful, because that's going to be true the vast majority of the time in any script, and especially in carefully planned scripts like what we see in the VMS.