(25-03-2019, 06:48 PM)geoffreycaveney wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding why a particular interpretation may be the most likely among many in an ambiguous writing system or cipher: It all depends on the context of the surrounding text, and what is most likely to be meaningful to the author (not what is meaningful to me or to you). In this case, I already had the following readings before interpreting this clause: reading of the "attribution" label at the end of the paragraph as "sparagmos" ; reading of the related word "thursos" in the immediately preceding clause ; reading of a semantically related verb after "thursos" in the immediately preceding clause ; reading of another Greek word for "love" with a different connotation in the immediately preceding clause. That is a significant number of context clues, is it not?
How can you be 100% sure that Ars is not "Iris"? What if the text is saying something slightly different from what you expect? What do you know of what was meaningful to the author?
You freely pick up meanings on the basis of what seems more likely to you. If the writer would have wanted to say that your thorsos wants Iris, he would have had no way to write it. Anything with r-s in it must be "eros", because you have decided that the context is such and such.
With all these degrees of freedom, you can do whatever you want. You can only do whatever you want. You make up the context, you make up the meaning. Maybe ars means eros because tors means thursos, or maybe ars means ouros because tors means theritos; this is your creative writing game. But if all you need is that the manuscript tells you that "a solitary thursos wants love", go with it. A manuscript that begins with as meaningful a question as "Is the mouth a form only?" will certainly be full of just as meaningful answers.