04-11-2018, 06:12 PM
(04-11-2018, 04:42 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The letter "a" is one of the most common letters in all languages and very common in Romance languages.
The sound "a" is one of the first sounds a baby makes and thus words like mama baba/papa are common to hundreds of languages and yet you have paired up the letter "a" with one of the rarest VMS characters.
I fully agree with you that the letter "a" should be seen frequently but I am not so sure that is not the case. About half the symbols in the decoding alphabet on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are rare, very rare. But the decoding alphabet appears to be only a mechanism for converting symbols into Latin letters and, as such, would be unrelated to letter frequencies.
In the marginalia, the symbol that looks like the letter "c" is merged into a backward slanted "i" to stand for the letter "a". Both the "c" and the backward "i" appear frequently in the VMS script but neither appears in the decoding alphabet. In a way, that makes sense: the high frequency of those letters in the script increases the chances that, when a line of script is rotated around a wheel adjacent to the alphabet wheel, one of those letters (or the union of the two) will land at a spot corresponding to the rare symbol you mentioned, thereby increasing the output of the letter "a".
Note a new observation: all four lines of Rosetta Stone script from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (each corresponding to where star-tail marginalia come to an end) begin with a symbol that looks like the letter "o" followed by a symbol that looks like the number "8" without its bottom. These two symbols are the same two symbols with which decoding alphabet begins. I doubt that it's just a coincidence, but I don't know what conclusions to draw from it.