The criticisms about mapping more than one glyph to a particular sound (r, in this case) do not show ignorance of language, as was said in the video. If Pelling pointed this out, I'm sure he is quite aware that there can be several similar sounds in a language.
The point is this: The VMS has a limited character set and mapping several glyphs to one sound significantly reduces the number of characters remaining for the other sounds, and this limitation has not been acknowledged in the Bax "provisional" decoding.
I believe it's a valid criticism, not a question that displays ignorance of languages. Persons pointing this out are showing awareness of the peculiarities of the VMS character set in relation to proposals based on substitution codes. One can't simply take a dozen words and map them to a character set and ignore the fact that there aren't enough glyphs left to represent the rest of the sounds in the proposed system.
The problem of "pick and mix" was raised in the video and yet isn't grabbing a few words and trying to organize them into a system that doesn't generalize to any other part of a fairly extensive manuscript, with tens of thousands of word-tokens, also an example of "pick and mix"?
I have to say, even though I don't agree with many of the assumptions and methods proposed, I was enjoying the video up to this point—I thnk the guys were doing a good job. When Bax made a personal attack on Pelling instead of acknowledging that there are problems when you use several different glyphs for one sound group (thus reducing the available pool for other sounds), it spoiled it for me.
The point is this: The VMS has a limited character set and mapping several glyphs to one sound significantly reduces the number of characters remaining for the other sounds, and this limitation has not been acknowledged in the Bax "provisional" decoding.
I believe it's a valid criticism, not a question that displays ignorance of languages. Persons pointing this out are showing awareness of the peculiarities of the VMS character set in relation to proposals based on substitution codes. One can't simply take a dozen words and map them to a character set and ignore the fact that there aren't enough glyphs left to represent the rest of the sounds in the proposed system.
The problem of "pick and mix" was raised in the video and yet isn't grabbing a few words and trying to organize them into a system that doesn't generalize to any other part of a fairly extensive manuscript, with tens of thousands of word-tokens, also an example of "pick and mix"?
I have to say, even though I don't agree with many of the assumptions and methods proposed, I was enjoying the video up to this point—I thnk the guys were doing a good job. When Bax made a personal attack on Pelling instead of acknowledging that there are problems when you use several different glyphs for one sound group (thus reducing the available pool for other sounds), it spoiled it for me.