12-02-2016, 11:58 AM
Well, discerning consonant from vowel is not entirely trivial, but I don't think mathematical or statistical methods are the only way (or even a very good way) to go about understanding the VMS word structure.
For one thing, it seems pretty clear that the VMS script is based on the Roman alphabet and symbols used in medieval Latin abbreviation. So when we see that the VMS letters <a>, <e>, and <o> are nearly identical to the "a", "e", and "o" of the Roman alphabet respectively, then I think this fact alone already suggests that these letters are intended to correspond to vowels, and probably even to similar vowels as these letters represent in European languages.
This similarity might be "overruled" if there were evidence that these letters do not represent vowels, but from a purely structural point of view they seem like good candidates for vowels just from simple considerations such as that every word must contain at least one vowel, and that groups of 1-3 consonants should be separated by vowels (which might not be true of all languages, but is at least often true and works well enough here). Of course, we need to include <y> as a vowel or semivowel in order to make this work. (There are other reasons to think of <y> as a vowel or semivowel that I won't get into now.)
Then there's the fact that we have one set of letters, containing a straight stroke, which may follow <a> but not <e>, and a corresponding set of letters containing a curved stroke which may follow <e> but not <a>, yet both sets of letters may follow <o>. While I suppose there may be other ways that this rule could be intepreted, it certainly looks like a phonotactic rule determining which consonants may follow which vowels, and at the very least demonstrates that <a>, <e>, and <o> form a related and important class of glyphs, central to the formation of nearly all words.
Really, the fact that EVA transliteration makes the text basically "pronouncible", as would likely any other transliteration scheme that mapped <a>, <e>, <o>, and <y> to vowels and the other letters to consonants (and considered <i> as a modifier), is by itself strong evidence that its implicit assignment of consonant and vowel status is basically correct. I doubt any other system would work nearly as well, though I don't know if it has actually been tried.
There's a few other points that I could raise here, but the general point is that VMS words are highly structured, and whoever created the script did so in such a way that the word structure is reflected in the shapes of the individual letters. I think this kind of evidence is more important than the results of any "one size fits all" algorithms applied to the text without any consideration of the text's known properties.
For one thing, it seems pretty clear that the VMS script is based on the Roman alphabet and symbols used in medieval Latin abbreviation. So when we see that the VMS letters <a>, <e>, and <o> are nearly identical to the "a", "e", and "o" of the Roman alphabet respectively, then I think this fact alone already suggests that these letters are intended to correspond to vowels, and probably even to similar vowels as these letters represent in European languages.
This similarity might be "overruled" if there were evidence that these letters do not represent vowels, but from a purely structural point of view they seem like good candidates for vowels just from simple considerations such as that every word must contain at least one vowel, and that groups of 1-3 consonants should be separated by vowels (which might not be true of all languages, but is at least often true and works well enough here). Of course, we need to include <y> as a vowel or semivowel in order to make this work. (There are other reasons to think of <y> as a vowel or semivowel that I won't get into now.)
Then there's the fact that we have one set of letters, containing a straight stroke, which may follow <a> but not <e>, and a corresponding set of letters containing a curved stroke which may follow <e> but not <a>, yet both sets of letters may follow <o>. While I suppose there may be other ways that this rule could be intepreted, it certainly looks like a phonotactic rule determining which consonants may follow which vowels, and at the very least demonstrates that <a>, <e>, and <o> form a related and important class of glyphs, central to the formation of nearly all words.
Really, the fact that EVA transliteration makes the text basically "pronouncible", as would likely any other transliteration scheme that mapped <a>, <e>, <o>, and <y> to vowels and the other letters to consonants (and considered <i> as a modifier), is by itself strong evidence that its implicit assignment of consonant and vowel status is basically correct. I doubt any other system would work nearly as well, though I don't know if it has actually been tried.
There's a few other points that I could raise here, but the general point is that VMS words are highly structured, and whoever created the script did so in such a way that the word structure is reflected in the shapes of the individual letters. I think this kind of evidence is more important than the results of any "one size fits all" algorithms applied to the text without any consideration of the text's known properties.
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