02-09-2019, 12:03 AM
I'm extremely suspicious of "a" and "o" and have never assumed they are vowels but I've noticed the vast majority of substitution "solutions" do make this assumption (in fact their ideas practically revolve around treating them as vowels).
What is interesting is that almost everyone who offers these substitution solutions tends to treat them as generic vowels (keeping them as vowels, but changing them from a and o to whatever works for their transliteration). I often wonder if this is because they instinctively sense that they don't WORK as substitution for natural languages, but the desire to keep them as vowels causes the solver to mutate them into whatever vowel suits the occasion.
But... if you take every vowel-like shape in the VMS and turn it into a consonant-like shape and vice-versa, you end up with is something that substitution solvers could probably wrestle out a transliteration in much the same way as they do now (different words would arise, of course, but it would probably be the same general result).
What is interesting is that almost everyone who offers these substitution solutions tends to treat them as generic vowels (keeping them as vowels, but changing them from a and o to whatever works for their transliteration). I often wonder if this is because they instinctively sense that they don't WORK as substitution for natural languages, but the desire to keep them as vowels causes the solver to mutate them into whatever vowel suits the occasion.
But... if you take every vowel-like shape in the VMS and turn it into a consonant-like shape and vice-versa, you end up with is something that substitution solvers could probably wrestle out a transliteration in much the same way as they do now (different words would arise, of course, but it would probably be the same general result).